Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP
Since getting a shiny new machine running Vista, I'd been having a bit of grief trying to get it to print to my Canon i6500 printer shared through another Windows XP machine. Vista has built-in support for the printer (running locally), but when trying to add it across a network, as the XP machine could not supply the correct 64bit Vista drivers, the Vista machine wasn't too happy - pointing to the correct location of the local device drivers didn't help either!
After sifting through various solutions - this was the one that worked for me.
On the Vista machine,
- Choose to add a local printer
- Create a new local port, and set its name so it matches the network share (\\server\name)
- Manually select the appropriate printer driver from the automatically supported set (or select an appropriate vista driver)
This then tricks Vista into thinking we have a local printer - so it can install the correct drivers - that actually redirects to the network printer.
I think this should work in the reverse direction too, if Windows XP is geting upset printing to a device shared through Vista.
Hope this helps someone!