Networking a printer

  • Thread starter Thread starter MB_
  • Start date Start date
M

MB_

Howdy. I need some basic help for dummies here.
I have a desktop. It has 2 printers. A parallel port Epson and a USB Canon
Pixma IP4000.

Each printer has sharing enabled (Printer 1 and Printer 2)

I have 2 laptops. I have no problem printing to the Epson.

I now want to add the Canon. How do I do this? Also, I no longer have the CD
that came with the Canon. But I'm sure the driver is somewhere on my
desktop. I can't find it. I searched C drive (using *.drv) but nothing looks
correct. There must be a menu that shows the name/location of the driver?

I am not sure how to proceed.

Mel
 
MB_ said:
Howdy. I need some basic help for dummies here.
I have a desktop. It has 2 printers. A parallel port Epson and a USB Canon
Pixma IP4000.

Each printer has sharing enabled (Printer 1 and Printer 2)

I have 2 laptops. I have no problem printing to the Epson.

I now want to add the Canon. How do I do this? Also, I no longer have the
CD that came with the Canon. But I'm sure the driver is somewhere on my
desktop. I can't find it. I searched C drive (using *.drv) but nothing
looks correct. There must be a menu that shows the name/location of the
driver?

I am not sure how to proceed.

Mel
Click to expand...
Download the software from Canon. Download the instructions from Canon.

As your printer connects to a USB port, the chain of programs which enable
the printing is a bit complicated. Most of the program usually reside in a
sub folder of \Program Files\
The only driver seems to be \Windows\System32\Drivers\usbprint.sys. Note
that you searched with the wrong extension. Usbprint.sys was written by
Microsoft.

My desktop has an Epson R1900, and the folder in \Program Files\... has a
number of programs and libraries for such. My desktop has an HP 5440, and
its folder also contains lots of files.

Jim
 
Jim said:
Download the software from Canon. Download the instructions from Canon.

As your printer connects to a USB port, the chain of programs which enable
the printing is a bit complicated. Most of the program usually reside in
a sub folder of \Program Files\
The only driver seems to be \Windows\System32\Drivers\usbprint.sys. Note
that you searched with the wrong extension. Usbprint.sys was written by
Microsoft.

My desktop has an Epson R1900, and the folder in \Program Files\... has a
number of programs and libraries for such. My desktop has an HP 5440, and
its folder also contains lots of files.

Jim
Click to expand...
Furthermore, if you wish to print from one machine to the other, the printer
software is usually installed on both. (The R1900 software does not need to
be installed on the remote systems, and there may be others for all I know.)

Jim
 
Ensure the Canon is shared, and make a note of the share name (as mentioned,
remove any spaces in the sharename) Also make sure you know the name of the
host computer (you can get this by typing 'set' into a cmd prompt)

Now, on the laptop, go to the printers control panel. Select add printer.
Specify a network printer and don't allow an automatic search. Instead, type
the printer location as \\computername\printername -with the slashes
literally as shown.

Provided the two computers are running the same OS, it should offer to copy
the driver over. If successful, that's it.

Tip: You can also use the host computer's IP address instead of its name.

It's also worth noting that multifunction print/fax/scan units are not
always suitable as shared printers, as they typically require a monster
driver-package which has to be installed locally.
 
Thanks folks. It turned out to be very easy.

The Canon printer had already been set to share via my desktop.

Then from each laptop, I just had to do ADD A Printer and then BROWSE for a
network printer. It found the Canon printer and all went well.

Mel
 
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