new to network printer sharing, driver question

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Guest

PC1 wantes to use shared printer connected to PC2. Does PC1 use the printer
driver installed on PC2 or was a driver copy placed on PC1 when printer
sharing was set up?
The reason I ask is I have a Vista and XP wired network. The XP has some
legacy hardware on it whose drivers are not Vista compatible. I can use the
printer connected to the XP from the Vista PC, but not the scanner. The
scanner shows up on my shared devices on the Vista PC, but calls from
programs will no share it. I'm assuming it's a driver access problem, but I
don't know if the Vista PC is trying to access the scaner driver on the XP PC
or if the problem is that it couldn't add it to its own list of drivers?
 
Qfreed said:
PC1 wantes to use shared printer connected to PC2. Does PC1 use the printer
driver installed on PC2 or was a driver copy placed on PC1 when printer
sharing was set up?
The reason I ask is I have a Vista and XP wired network. The XP has some
legacy hardware on it whose drivers are not Vista compatible. I can use the
printer connected to the XP from the Vista PC, but not the scanner. The
scanner shows up on my shared devices on the Vista PC, but calls from
programs will no share it. I'm assuming it's a driver access problem, but I
don't know if the Vista PC is trying to access the scaner driver on the XP PC
or if the problem is that it couldn't add it to its own list of drivers?
Click to expand...

1. You always install the drivers for the correct operating system on
the computer which doesn't have the printer connected to it. So you
would set up your Local Area Network (LAN) sharing first and then
install Vista drivers for that model printer on the Vista machine. It
depends on how the printer drivers are written whether the driver
installation routine has a wizard that will find the printer connected
to the other machine or whether you need to use the "Add Printer" wizard
on Vista.

2. Consumer-level scanners cannot be shared over the network. There are
network scanners, but they are many thousands of dollars (USD) and
usually work by scanning the images onto a server.


Malke
 
Thank you. I thought when I set up file and printer sharing from my Windows
Vista PC that Windows posted some note during the process that it was copying
or installing the shared device drivers from my XP PC. Seems Vista did it
automatically for me so later I wasn't sure what had happened. Now I am.
Thank you.
And thank you for the info on scanners. You saved me a lot of time trying
to access its driver to find out if it could be shared. Since its Vista
incompatible I thought that was the problem-that it couldn't be installed on
my Vista OS. Now that I know scanners (non-network ready) can't be shared
I'll drop the whole endeavor.
 
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