Needing advice about sharing printers...

Alrighty... here's the sitch.

I have a really old ThinkPad T21; been a very good machine to me for years but I've upgraded to more powerful notebooks. I've gotten the bright idea to put it out to pasture as a makeshift wireless NAS/print server. The printer is an old Canon BJC-8200.

The T21 is currently running XP(I think SP1). I primarily use two machines... a ThinkPad T42(running XP SP2), and a Dell XPS M1730(running Vista Ultimate x64). I have set the printer up on the T21 and it's working flawlessly. After sharing the printer, I have been able to set it up on the T42 with little to no fuss at all.

I can't get the M1730 to print wirelessly, as it won't download the correct drivers. I have verified that Vista x64 supports this printer natively... all I had to do is plug it into the M1730 and it was set up and printing within seconds.

I figure all I'd have to do is find the .inf file Vista is using to drive this printer and select it when installing the remote printer asks for a driver, but I can't find any information on where this driver would be. The printer doesn't show up in the device manager, nor can I find any info on it in the printer properties page.

I wouldn't normally be too worried about it as I don't do too much printing on the XPS, but I'm kinda considering jumping to Vista on the T42 as well... time will tell on that one but I'd like to make sure everything will function correctly if I do.

So... where can I find out where this 'stock' driver is at?

 

Most likely, the _Vista 64-bit machine can't "see" the T21, or anything attached to it, because the T21 is running XPSP1 - the network protocols used by _Vista require that XP-based machines have what's called the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder (aka "LLTDR") installed on them. You can do that one of two ways: (1) by downloading and installing the LLTDR as a separate package from here, or (2) upgrading the XP installation to SP3, which contains the LLTDR functionality.

If you're still running SP1 on that XP box, you would be best advised to upgrade it to SP3 (which will most likely require that you first install SP2, and then install SP3 - both should be available for free from Microsoft's website). Even if you don't use the T21 for browsing and whatnot, it's still on your network, which means that it's potentially accessible from the internet should someone manage to breach your firewalls and get inside. XPSP1 had significant security and performance issues and really shouldn't be allowed to connect to a network, even a private network.

 

^^^ Ah come on Shyster1, you've made a mest...fix up that post please.

And you don't need to put the _ (underscore) infront of Vista anymore. It appears to have stop being a humbug.

 

Thanks for the info. It turns out that the T21 had SP2 installed... it had been a long time since I fired it up last and I forgot what I had done to it before I put it away. I went ahead and updated to SP3. I can see the T21 on the network, access shared files and etc... but the same thing happens. I'm prompted to search for a driver for this printer, and since Vista has it 'built-in' I can't exactly download an .inf and select that.

What I think I'm going to have to do is figure out where Vista keeps its standard drivers and point over to that. Does anyone know where these files are kept?

 

Can't you download a new driver package from the vendor's web site, expand it, then browse to it during the install?

Alternatively, since you said you can print to it when it's installed locally (I'm assuming USB) can you go ahead and set it up that way, then go into the printer properties and simply change the printer port from the local port to the shared printer on the T21? \\T21NAME\PRINTERNAME, or whatever? Will that work?