XP Home Printer Sharing to Vista Home Premium

[link470]

So here's a pickle. I have a client who has an XP Home machine [this is at their house not at the school network. They have that XP home machine, and a Dell Inspiron 1521 Windows Vista Home Premium notebook computer. They're running on a home broadband connection with a WBR-2310 router which shouldn't make a difference but adding it for more detail.

 

Both machines have fresh installs on them. XP Home, and Vista machines both have the same workgroup name. I've installed a Dell All-In-One 926 photo printer downstairs on the XP machine. I then shared that printer on the network.

 

When I go to the Vista laptop, I either use the UNC path of the XP machine, or use the add printer wizard, or use the network browser, and using one of those methods, locate the printer. When I add the printer, it says Access Denied. I've looked around a few forums for this problem fix, and nobody has one yet. You'd think they'd allow a simple family printer share to work out of the box, let alone have someone like me go over and not be able to install it for them.

 

So it works perfectly on the XP machine, but not over the network. I cant access the security tab of course becuase it's Windows XP Home and you can't uncheck "Use Simple File Sharing" because the box isn't there on XP home. The only way to access the security tab is by booting into safemode and logging in as the local administrator, which of course, won't help because if you're running in safe mode your not going to see the USB printer anyways cause the drivers didn't load for it. So you can't set security.

 

Has anyone else had problems sharing an XP printer to a Vista machine? It's not a network printer otherwise configuring ports for it would be easy.

 

If anyone has any ideas that would be great. It shouldn't be this hard. Thanks!

[Geoff]

Create a user on the XP Home machine with the same login and password as the one being used on the Vista machine.