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I know theres the odd IT pro on here, any ideas with this.

This drove me nuts earlier, my first real experience with Vista.

I have a Windows XP machine with a shared printer, the sharename is \\computer1\hpoffice. Ip address of machine 192.168.2.3

I have a Windoes Vista machine called computer 2 with IP 192.168.2.2

I can ping between the machines fine.

I'm trying to access the printer from the Vista machine, tried using the standard add printer, network printer, share name. Tried both using the UNC path \\computer1\hpoffice and also by ip \\192.168.2.3\hpoffice. The error message was - the network path could not be found.

Both machines are in the same workgroup but cannot browse to the XP one whatsoever, again - the network path could not be found.

What am i missing?

Cheers

Firewall...and that bullshit "Simple File Sharing"

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

I thought about that, but both machines have the windows firewall turned off, and couldn't find any 3rd party firewall installed like zone alarm etc.

XP Home or XP Pro?

_________________
What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

XP Home

Can you browse and print to the XP machine from another XP machine or is it only Vista that screws up?

Shot in the dark here

The host machine "borrows" the driver from the print server when using the printer sharing in windows.

Could the driver be incompatable with vista?

Yes XP to XP is fine, its just the Vista machine that wont connect



I dont think its getting as far as asking for the driver, it just wont browse the XP machine. It would be the same for example if I wanted to connect to a file share instead of a printer

There is a service you have to install on XP machines to allow Vista machines to see them.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

Unfortunately, since you're saying you can't even connect to it directly. I'm going to go with a firewall issue.

Disable Windows firewall on both machines, and uninstall any 3rd party security products. Especially ones made by Norton / Symantec. See if it works and then start putting them back (except for the Norton ones they are shit) testing the connection at each stage until you find out what broke it.

Okay I installed that and that seemed to solve the connectivity problem. But now something else. When I try and connect to the printer I get this error

"Windows cannot connect to the printer. The server print spooler service is
not running. Please restart the spooler on the server or restart the server
machine."

The spooler service on the XP machine is running fine and I can print no problem from other non Vista PC's

I've only managed to find a handful of references to this error (like the one below) and no solution.

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-networkin ... oblem.html

Any ideas?

Cheers

I have no idea, since I've only touched a Vista machine once (and that was to connect to a 2003 terminal services session).

I don't suppose your printer can be directly connected to your network by any chance?