6/6/2007
Network Printing from a Mac to XP
I purchased a ‘free’ (with rebates) HP printer with my last MacBook last month. I had originally intended to list it on Ebay with a ton of other tech junk I need out of my house. This hadn’t happened and my MacBook still didn’t have a printer available to it (can’t find OS X drivers for my old Epson Actionlaser workhorse), so I thought I’d hook it up.
Network printing seemed to be the best option since the MacBook may be wireless anywhere in my house. The only permanently connected (and non-laptop) box I have is an aging XP machine. Setting up a printer on it and allowing network access to my workgroup should be a snap, or so I thought. Boy, was I wrong.
Long story, short… I was able to install the printer locally only. I was able to work around OS X’s undocumented feature to access the advanced printing properties with the help of a few pages from Google. Namely from Erik J. Heels’ blog. Using his howto, I got the printer connection up, but all of my prints were garbage on account of no available driver for my specific printer being available. The HP setup disk did install a driver that I could use locally but the new driver is not showing up under available drivers when setting up the printer via Samba.
It is interesting that in this instance Windows is more user-friendly than good ‘ol Apple. Why doesn’t the new printer driver get added to the overall driver list as in all Windows versions since 95? Why are the advanced printer settings hidden and undocumented in OS X?
Anyone know where the printer drivers are actually installed so I could manually select the file?
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