Windows 7: WiFi printer not recognised by Win7 laptop

Hi all, hope you all had a great christmas holiday. Well now then, I have got a Epson SX235W. It can be used with either cable or wifi. I have been unsuccesfull in setting the wireless side up, cable is ok. The laptop does not find it when scanning to look for it during the setup phase.
I uninstalled it and run setup again but only tried to do the wireless part and still no joy. The Epson site is no good and does not show anything to help me. The WiFi on the computer and printer is switched on and I had the printer on the table beside the laptop so distance apart was not an issue.
I have read that I need to go to register the mac address with the computer but dont know how to do this or even find the mac address for the printer.
Hope someone can give me some sort of help and advice as her indoors wants the printer of the kitchen table. Thanks everyone for your help in advance.

I don't know about your Epson, but when I setup my wireless capable HP laserjet I ran the setup with the printer connected to the PC via a USB cable. It was a two part setup. You configure the printers WIFI settings over USB, and then once it connects to the router you pull the USB cord and finish the setup over your WIFI. I had to tell the printer what my SSID was and what my WIFI password was so it could connect. The only way to do that was with a physical connection to the printer. Once it was on my network setting it up on my other PC's was easy. The actual setup software and drivers were on the printer and ran from the printer when I plugged it in.

Thanks for that alphanumeric, I think that is where I am going wrong. I dont have the router connected or even set up. My phone is not switched on till Monday. I will try that and connect it all up tomorrow, dont need the phone line to set things up that way. Cheers. I will post back and let you know what happened.

You could turn the router on and setup the LAN side and configure its wireless without having an Internet WAN connection. Then setup the printers WIFI. The printer needs a WIFI network to work wirelessly. If you read though the setup instructions there probably is a way to set it up with an ad hoc connection to a PC but why bother with that if your going to setup a router anyway.

Thats true alphanumeric, I thought I would have time this weekend to do it but I am on nights and that puts a brake on my brain actually trying to work. I will hopefully have the time on wednesday so will let you know how I got on.
Cheers

You need a wireless router to setup the epson SX range printers wirelessly.

When u run the setup it asks you to hold the wifi button down on the font of the printer so it connects to the laptop that the installation is being ran on to copy over the wireless settings for the router. It then diconnects from the source of installation and connects to the wireless router. At the same time it installs the drivers for the printer to work wirelessly on the computer in question.

If you havent got a wireless router it wont work!

hope that helps.

Yes thanks that helps me a lot. I have a wireless router. Si I am hopeing after my last shift tonight I may be able to get sorted. Ilike to say thanks to you all for your advice.

Ive got the same printer and thought id have had to dig out my USB cable (to some difficulty) and when I ran setup it simply asked for me to press and hold my wireless button on front of printer and within a minute it had worked fine!

You'l be fine, just follow what the cd says!

An update, I have got it working at last. I set up the router and gave it a good strong pass key. Then when ran the setup disc again for the printer. With it having the drivers in for the wired side of things it skiped past that onto the wireless setup. It went smoth enough and found the printer within 30 seconds. It worked ok. I restarted the laptop but found that I needed to switch off the printer and back on to get the laptop to see it again. Thats no problem though. Just like to say thankyou everyone for your input and help to get me going. Thankyou.

I think people tend to make network printer setup much more difficult than it has to be. Regardless of the brand, the setup is almost always the same.

1. Set the IP address on the printer to something outside of your DHCP range.
2. Make sure your computer can ping the address you set.
3. Run the manufacturer's driver utility and follow the steps.

I've set up countless network printers of various brands and those steps always work.