Sharing Printers

Win7 Ultimate. HP CP1025NW

While this printer has a network option, I prefer to go through my desktop computer, so I can track what is going on. My room mate is a Major Luddite. She has a laptop still running Vista I would also like to give access.

Start at the beginning, XP was a dream to use this for, it would even use its drivers.

So do I have to set up a peer to peer between computers?

The desktop (which has the printer) also has a 1 Terabyte hard dr5ive I would also like to share.My lappie (Win 7 Ultimate) will also get in on the action once I learn how.

 

all you should need to do is go to the 'printer properties', and there should be a tab called sharing. just enable sharing,
and the vista computer should see it. as long as the printer has drivers for vista, you should be good to go.
then, during the install of the printer drivers on vista, select networked printer, and browse to your printer.
same thing with the hard drive. the properties of the hard drive should have a sharing tab, but what would be easier
would be to create a subfolder on the hard drive, and share that folder instead of the whole hard drive. sharing folders
seem to work better than whole hard drives. good luck with it.

 

OK, how do I find a shared device on the network? Clicking on sharing is easy.

 

Let me as a different way,
How do I add a User ID and password to log in on a computer I wish to share?

 

i did forget one thing, both computers should have the same workgroup name.
control panel -> system -> "change settings for name/domain/workgroup" -> click the "change" button to change workgroup
if both computers have the same workgroup name, then browsing the network is easier to find what is shared.

with a shared hard drive, open "computer" -> click 'tools' menu bar -> then map network drive.
then click browse button to see what is available on the network.

there is a guest account in win7, but it is disabled. to enable it...
control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> local users and groups -> users
then double click guest and uncheck account is disabled. they can then connect to the shared hard drive folder as guest.
or, if you prefer... while "users" is highlighted in the left panel, click "action" in menu -> new user
and you can create a new user and password specifically for the shared hard drive folder.
if you decide to just share the printer, you should not need to create new user just to print.
on the vista computer, when adding a new printer, choose network printer and then browse to find it on win7.

i think that is all, good luck with it.

 

Success! Thank you. Now to see if I can do it on Vista. If not I'll start another thread