printer on the LAN

[speedlever]

I set up a wireless router (WRT54G) a long time ago for a friend. There is a HP 7400 AIO printer connected by ethernet to the router. All has worked just fine for a long time.

For some reason, one of the wireless computers won't connect to the printer. I can ping the printer, but when I go to Control Panel/Printers, it says unable to connect to that printer.

Thinking it was a firewall issue, I disabled the firewall, even exiting it. But still no connection could be established. Yet I can still ping it from the affected PC.

A laptop running Vista can print just fine over the LAN. The affected PC (XP)gets out to the internet just fine.

When I try to set up a new printer (the HP 7400), I get a msg saying the spooler sevice (or somesuch) is not running. If I try to manually setup the printer using the printer's IP (192.168.1.100), it stops at the point where it needs a certain file... which is not on the HP printer driver disk. I found the file online but it won't accept it.

I am stumped. Any thoughts?

 

[Tarrant64]

The message you are getting about the print spooler service not running could very well be the problem. You will need this service started(or restarted if it already is running) in order to get the printer working again.

You can do this from the services panel in XP. Start -> Run -> services.msc

From here scroll down to "Print Spooler" servier. Right-click and choose to Restart. If that doesn't work(or isn't an option), just choose to stop the service. Wait a minute or two and restart it(sometimes all it takes is 10-15 seconds, but hell sometimes it works if you just wait a little bit).

Give this a go!

 

[speedlever]

I'll try that. Thanks for the tip.

Seems I've seen that before (about the print spooler service) on another system with a similar problem. In that case, I stopped the FW and/or rebooted the wireless PC and when I checked the printer page, it connected again... at which point I restarted the FW and all was well. This time, Non of my usual tricks worked.