Networking question! 10pts!?

Question

I have macbook and an hp pavillion desktop (though that doesnt really matter)...the problem is I want to be able to share my printer over my wifi connection....at the moment my printer is plugged directly into my pc and i've set it to shared printer in network settings and all that other jazz but it wont show up on my mac...im assuming this has something to do with them being different OS. My printer is an HP photosmart all in one thing and it doesnt hav an ethernet cable so i can plug it into my router so wat can i do?

Answer 1

You absolutely can do this.  I have two printers running with this configuration

On the Mac -

File / Print / Add Printer

It should find the shared printer on the PC

If not, you have a problem with the Samba configuration.

In my experience, newer macs just work with PC shares, older ones take some fiddling, and the menus have changed several times, so I can't help you there.  Look in the Help files for Samba or smb:.

Answer 2

It might be because you need different drivers for the mac.  Have you downloaded the mac driver or are you just looking for it over the network?

Answer 3

you have to make sure that you have the appletalk protocal on the PC , and be sure that you have file and print sharing enabled on the PC and that the printer is actually shared. you also have to set your firewall to allow print sharing. Last you have to add the printer on your mac...go through the add printer setup. to do all this right click on network neighborhood and select properties. make sure you add file and print sharing if it's not there. go ahead and add apple talk too. once that's done, right click on the printer and make sure the printer is set to share. you also have to adjust the permissions for the share. add the system, everyone, and guest groups (if enabled) and make sure they have full control.

You need to adjust windows firewall to allow printer sharing. get into security center and click on firewall. on the exceptions tab, be sure that you have file and print sharing allowed so the firewall will pass print requests.

You might have to install the printer driver on the mac as well...maybe not but it helps. get the mac version from the website.  

if you cannot share folders between the computers over ethernet, then you have a protocol or permissions issue. if you can share folders, but cannot share printer, then you have a driver issue. install latest driver for both mac and PC respectivly.

if none of that works...look in your services and make sure that the server service is running. make sure the print spooler service is running.

Answer 4

You need  to manually add a Windows shared printer...

Open Printer Setup Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities).

Mac OS X 10.4.x users: Choose Add Printer from the Printers menu, then hold the Option key while clicking the "More Printers" button.

Mac OS X 10.3.x users: Hold the Option key down while choosing Add Printer from the Printers menu.

Choose Advanced from the first pop-up menu.

Choose Windows Printer via SAMBA from the Device pop-up menu.

In the Device Name field, type the name you would like to use for this printer in Mac OS X.

In the Device URI field, use one of the following formats to link to the printer:

smb://user:password@workgroup/server/s...

smb://user:password@server/sharename

smb://workgroup/server/sharename

smb://server/sharename

Notes: "user" is the name of a Windows user who has privileges to use the printer. "password" is the password of that Windows user. "workgroup" is the name of the Windows workgroup to which the computer sharing the printer belongs. "server" is the name of the computer sharing the printer or its IP address. "sharename" is the shared Windows printer's share name.

Tip: You don't need a "workgroup" when specifying the IP address of the computer (such as when the printer is on a different subnet), or if your Mac belongs to the same Windows (SMB) workgroup.

Choose the appropriate PPD or printer driver from the Printer Model pop-up menu.

Click Add.