Accessing a shared HP Laserjet printer on an XP machine

[BonzaiDuck]

Last time I visited here, someone gave me guidance for accessing a Windows 2000 file-server from VISTA 64. It was fairly simple -- I should've figured it out -- it required simply manually typing in the IP address for the server.

On the household peer-to-peer LAN, I have an XP system hosting an HP LaserJet 1200 printer. I have been unsuccessful accessing this printer from the VISTA system although it shows up under VISTA 64 network, computers and shared printers.

I downloaded the VISTA x64 driver self-extracting exe from HP, and ran the program. It detects the network printer, but cannot communicate with it. A message box reports that I need the appropriate drivers. When I browse the directory with the extracted HP drivers, it refuses to recognize anything there.

It seems that the option for choosing to set up a "network printer" from the "Add Printer" dialog is not the correct choice, and only presents options of network printer models that connect directly to the LAN as opposed to a printer that is shared on another host computer in the LAN.

Does anyone have insights or suggestions on how I can get this to work?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, I found my solution five minutes after posting this, after an accurate hit on my sixth or seventh web-search:

Accessing a shared printer on XP host with a VISTA 64 client on a LAN

For any interested or experiencing the same problem, you must select the "Local Printer" option on the "Add Printer" dialog, "Create a new port," punch in the "\\computer-name\printer-share-name" and proceed from there.

Works great. I must be getting old. I've previously found these sorts of hurdles to be easy to figure out.