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sm8000 · Apr 17, 2006, 12:12 PM

I do helpdesk for a medium sized office. One of our departments is entirely a Mac house, except for two users who each have both a Mac desktop and a Windows laptop. One of these users needs to be able to print to a printer connected via USB to a nearby Mac, from his Windows laptop. The Mac is running OS X 10.3.9, the laptop Windows XP SP1.

So far I have gone into System Preferences -> Sharing and enabled Windows Sharing. I have also enabled printer sharing, the other Macs can print to it just fine. The laptop in question can see the printer, but print jobs fail. I have tried connecting it as a local printer via TCP/IP port (using the Mac's IP address) and as a network printer (192.168.71.95\Epson etc...). Connected by the former I get "The document failed to print" and by the latter nothing happens, everything just sits there. Windows thinks it is printing, but nothing happens - any ideas?

ghporter · Apr 17, 2006, 06:14 PM

Sharing USB printers is notoriously difficult. It seems to be related to what's built into BOTH the serving computer's driver AND the client computer's driver. It seems that both have to include the right parts-and such driver pairs are few and far between. Often, network USB print servers do better than computer-hosted shared USB printers, but that's no guarantee either. Here, it looks amazingly like Epson's Windows driver doesn't properly support sharing a Mac-hosted USB printer.

Oh, and get that laptop up to SP2 before the user gets hosed over; SP2 is MUCH better than anything before it.

sm8000 · Apr 17, 2006, 09:27 PM

That laptop will be up to SP2 when the rest of the building is - right now there are incompatibilities with some of our Novell and Symantec software, but that will all change this summer.

I've heard elsewhere that I can use Apple's Color Laserwriter driver for this printer. I'll try that tomorrow and if that doesn't work I was also given a link on using OS X's Samba to share the printer - though if it gets to that point it may just be easier to get a little print server.

ghporter · Apr 18, 2006, 07:39 AM

Gotcha on the SP2 thing. Most people don't have to worry about incompatibilities with an installed software base, even in a corporate environment, so SP2 should be installed just about everywhere. In YOUR case, that's been looked at, so you're on top of it.

I think you have a good chance of getting at least a different set of results with the Color Laserwriter driver; maybe even the ones you want. From what I've seen, it's a crapshoot as far as whether or not you'll get cross platform USB printer sharing to work. I chose my home laser (an older Samsung) because it had a parallel port that I could connect to a network print server for that reason.

sm8000 · Apr 19, 2006, 08:31 AM

Here's what I did to get it working:

1) Enabled Windows Sharing on the Mac, and shared the printer
2) Got the IP address of the Mac
3) On the laptop, ran the Add Printer Wizard. Added it as a Network Printer: \\192.168.71.95\EPSON etc...
4) When prompted to install a driver for the printer on the laptop, used Apple Color Laserwriter's driver, already included in the list of available Windows drivers.

Thanks for your help!