Problem installing printer driver 4printer connected&shared on othr pc  

Hi,

I'm facing a dilemma here. Windows 7 is awesome with automatic driver detection for new hardware, however, now I'm facing a problem.

PC1 is running Windows 7 and is connected to local area network.
PC2 is running Windows XP and is sharing my office printer (connected to LPT1)

Printer = LaserJet 4000 pcl5, shared.

Printer is installed on XP using drivers from HP website.


A few months ago Microsoft released a driver for Windows 7 for the HP LJ4000, so when you connect this printer to your computer it can automatically install the driver from the Microsoft Windows 7 online driver database.

This is also what HP says and because of this it's not making the driver available for download.

This makes me sad, because when I want to connect to the printer shared on my other machine running XP, using windows 7, it tells me the drivers aren't found on the network, which is logical because it's offering XP drivers.


How do I proceed to get the drivers for Windows 7 so I can print over my local area network (from PC1 to PC2)?

Kind regards and thanks for your time! =]


P.S. It tells me the drivers aren't found on the network and lets me select a location to install them from, but since I can't download them from the HP site and I don't know where to download the ones microsoft is offering I can't use that option.

Lol, there is no Vista driver, only program for buying HP products: "Shop for HP Products". But thanks for thinking with me here.

Ok so after a little googling I found this nice link to an extensive howto on creating a proxy-printing share on windows xp.

Robert Harder » Share a Windows Printer with a Mac

This helps allot since now I'm not bound to using silly undownloadable Windows 7 drivers for my LaserJet 4000 machine. BUT ...

There's always a but, now I just need Windows 7 drivers for ANY ... printer, also compatible with Windows XP SP2 ^_^.

Can anyone help me with that??? Pretty please

I was wrong, thought I had nailed how the tutorial worked but it was slightly different from wat I expected.

After completing the tutorial, in Windows 7 you do the following:

- Add printer, networkprinter
- select "The printer that I want isn't listed"
- select "Add a printer using TCP/IP address or hostname
- Autodetect, enter ONLY the IP of the computer sharing the printer
- it says contacting printer, since I disabled certain features on my XP machine,
mine says: "Detecting TCP/IP Port", which will eventualy fail and ask for additional
port information
- Select "Custom"
- Select LPR (You're gonna use the port created in some step of the tutorial)
- Enter the name of the printer from the tutorial using the Apple printer driver
- select LPR Byte Counting Enabled
- Select "Next",
- when asked for a driver, select "Generic" in left, and "ms publisher imagesetter" in right,
- if not available, driver might come with office 2010 (I have it installed) dunno about that.
- Print a test page,
- Succes! =]

This might work with all printers as far as I know, you just need Windows XP drivers for this to make it happen.