Xp and Epson stylus 425w - help needed!

hello all. my family recently bought a epson stylus printer. but im experiencing a problem with the printer on my dad's old windows xp laptop. the printer is supposed to print over wireless lan, but when he tries to print it cannot connect. it just searches for a printer for a long time. i found a temporary solution to the problem. if he turns of the firewall, prints and then enables the firewall again, it's able to find the printer, until restart. obviously it's a problem with the firewall, but i can't seem to figure out what it precisely is
my sisters i also experiencing it on her windows xp netbook.
on my own laptop with windows seven it works..

hope you guys can help me out

 

Without knowing a little more about your network or that printer it is kind of tough to say what is going on here. Windows XP firewall should allow printing to occur unimpeded.

How did you set up the printer on the xp machines? Did you run some program to detect the printer?

My guess is the epson uses some sort of proprietary print monitor to handle the connection, which means you would need to go to control panel > windows firewall and add that monitor to the exceptions list on the exceptions tab.

A preferred method might be to set a static ip address on the printer and then connect directly to the printer.

Control Panel >Printers And Faxes > Add Printer Wizard, choose LOCAL PRINTER ATTACHED TO THIS COMPUTER (uncheck AUTOMATICALLY DETECT)--I know this is counter intuitive--then choose CREATE NEW PORT, select STANDARD TCPIP, type in static ip address of printer, then point to the INF file of the printer driver.

(you can download the printer driver and extract the files rather than run the setup utility)