Epson Photo R200 printer will not work on home network

I have TWO computers on a "home" network (Work group, NOT Win 7 Homegroup). Computer A is new and runs Windows 7 Home Premium. Computer B is "old" and runs Windows XP Professional. Computer A has two printers attached; Epson Stylus Photo R200 and a Lexmark X3690. Both of these printers work well with Computer A

Computer B has an HP LaserJet printer on the parallel port LPT1. Computer A can print documents to the LaserJet on PC B as well as photos and documents to the Epson and Lexmark printers. Computer B can print to to the laserjet and the Lexmark BUT NOT the Epson.

When I try to "add" the Epson to the printers on PC B there is a message that computer A does not have the correct driver for the printer. The same message occurred when I initially "added" the Lexmark to PC B, but I was able using the CD supplied with the Lexmark to located the 32bit driver and load it onto PC A.

I tried to do the same thing with the Epson but failed to find the driver on the CD. I have tried downloading a 32 bit Epson driver from the Epson site, (using compatability mode) but even after doing that I cannot add the Epson printer to Computer B - the same message that PC-A does not have the correct driver.

I have contacted the Epson customer support team and they have been unable to solve the problem for me. Can any one help please?

Hello Marymount. Welcome to the forum.

You can usually install the XP driver for the Epson printer onto the XP PC (Computer B) and then add it as a network printer using "Add a Printer".

But, if you do not need the full functionality of the driver software you can install the printer on Computer B without installing the driver package. You just need to be able to find the .inf driver files inside the folder in the driver package so you can copy them or point XP to them. If it is an All-in-One printer there will be 3 .inf files (printer, fax, scan).

I've done it this way before:
(With the Epson and Computer A on and connected to the LAN, and working on Computer B)
1. Copy Driver files to Computer B (folder), or a USB stick
2. Start > Settings > Printers > Add a Printer
3. Select Network Printers
4. Search for printers > STOP when it finds the Epson> Select the R200 > Next
5. "Windows can't find a driver > OK (Search Manually)
6. Browse to the folder where the driver files are stored > OK
7. Windows finds, connects, and installs all drivers
8. Print a Test Page
9. Finish

Hope that helps.

Hello TVeblen,

Thank you for your reply. I have tried what you suggest, but without success. I have the original CD provided with the printer and this will install the printer on the XP machine (PC-B), whilst the Win 7, machine PC-A, auto installs; so I can get the printer to work individually on both computers, but A cannot "Add" it when it is connected to B and vice-versa.

Looking at the original CD there are 7 *.INF files (it is a printer only), these are:-
EPIIFEBH (in E:\ & E:\ENGLISH\WIN9X the two versions are different)
EPUSB5E (in E:\ & E:\ENGLISH\WIN9X the two versions are the same)
EPIIFEBH (in E:\ENGLISH\WIN9X)
EPIIFPBH (in E:\ENGLISH\WIN9X)
E_DF18HE (in E:\ENGLISH\WINXP_2K)
E_DF18HP (in E:\ENGLISH\WINXP_2K)

I have tried to "Add Printer" pointing to each of these in turn (as per your suggested action at step 6 in your reply) and each time I get the message that folder does not contain the driver. I have tried this procedure with the printer connected to each in turn and "adding" in the other. I have also with the printer connected to PC-A looked at <Printer Properties, Sharing, Addition Driver> and tried to add a 32 bit driver, again pointing to the .INF files on the original CD. Again no success. (This technique did however work for another printer - a Lexmark X3690, so I can't be doing everything incorrectly!)

I have also tried to down load a 32 bit driver from the Epson site to the 64 bit machine, PC-A. This did not work either (I was able to download using compatability mode but it did not solve my fundamental problem!)

So I think that I have tried what you suggest (and possibly more), but without success - unless that is in my ignorance I have not fully understood what's going on. So if you or anyone else can shed some more light on the problem I'm stuck.

Thanks again for your reply.

No, sounds like you are doing everything correctly. Those solutions just don't seem to work for you.

One thing to mention: it may be a good idea to do a System Restore to a date before you attempted to install the printer. Sometimes things can get more complicated if you have tried to install it multiple times.

Here are a couple of other solutions to try. These are for Vista/XP installations, but the same applies for a 7/XP installation.

The main idea here is to have the printer drivers installed on the XP machine, and then manually point the XP computer to the printer on the W7 machine using the Printer Ports.
It is very important to have the Computer Name and Printer Share Name correct.

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topi...-xp-and-vista/page__view__findpost__p__959022

http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7589_102-232132.html

I did have a network between my Win7 PC with a printer attached and an XP machine. I had to install the drivers to the XP machine then it could print to the printer on the 7 machine.
there may be some steps here that could help. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/53830-file-sharing-between-xp-w7-vice-versa-4.html#post779715

TVeblen and Britton 30,

Many thanks for suggestions, will follow them up - right now "she who must be obeyed" has suggested that I repair the green house, so no more computing for a while!

Thanks.

Sure, wait until "she who must be obeyed" needs a document printed, LOL

Marymount said:

right now "she who must be obeyed" has suggested that I repair the green house, so no more computing for a while!

Click to expand...

I can only tell you MM that I have the R200 in a "network sharing" setup (different from yours in that it's connected to a little D-Link print server) and it works fine, including of course that I can see & print to the R200 from an XP Pro 32-bit PC.

I can only suggest that Computer A is being snotty (as W7 can sometimes be ) and to try to reinstall the Epson from scratch which, AFAICT from the Epson webpage here

Epson America, Inc. - Support - Highlights

means you DON'T need to install anything to the W7 machine i.e. it says "W7 drivers are included for the R200". Then when you share the printer and attempt to Add it to your XP machine, to point your XP to the latest XP driver from their website which afaict is epson11220.exe from Oct 06, 3004 (the 8Mb file).

So I can only suspect that if you installed a driver to your W7HP machine for the R200, and altho it works to print locally, it has broken the network sharing aspect of W7 somehow, so you may need to get it outta there.

I found a solution that worked for me

I'm going to post the long version of this for any Googler's out there looking for a solution to this.
For the speed demons out there, scroll down to the section titled "SOLUTION".
I hope someone can find an easier solution than this, but here's what I had to do.

We had a similar scenario here. We have a network with 6 PCs. 3 are Windows XP x86, 2 are Windows 7 x64, and 1 is Windows Server 2003 x64. The Epson Photo Stylus R200 was connected to one of the WinXP machines.

Everything was working fine until we had a power outage this weekend. Now the WinXP PC that was hosting the printer will not come on. We get a series of beeps which = bad. The next most practical PC to host the printer is the Win7 PC that is also right next to the printer. The other PCs are much further away.

We connected the printer to the Win7 machine, downloaded the Win7 x64 drivers from the Epson website here, installed them, tested the printer... everything works great.

Next step: install on other Windows 7 machines. Installs great over network. Works perfect.

Next step: install on WinXP machines. It failed on each one.

Let me add this little tidbit first- With network printer sharing in Windows, there are 2 ways to install the printer driver when you add the printer manually:
1: Either the host computer (PC hosting the printer) can serve up the driver, or
2: You can install the printer manually on the local PC (the PC connecting to the printer over the network)
If the host PC has a driver available that matches the needs of the local PC, Windows will transfer the driver automatically for you. If not, Windows will prompt you to install it.

So on each of the WinXP machines, the setup would prompt me to install the driver myself. This made sense to me, because I didn't think that the Win7 x64 driver on the host PC was going to work on WinXP x86 machines. So it asked for me to choose one.

I went back to the Epson website and got the appropriate WinXP x86 drivers here.

Side Note: These drivers from Epson are a little annoying to me. Because instead of giving me a ZIP file that I can unpack and save somewhere, they are self-extracting ZIPs. They unpack to some obscure location, then auto-runs the installer. And just when you think you're actually going to get to the files.. nope, it unpacks ANOTHER setup.exe file that then unpacks ANOTHER set of files. It starts the printer installer program that starts trying to find your printer. Once this starts, you can get to the real actual files here (WinXP):
C:\Program Files\EPSON\PrinterDriverTemp\SPR200
or here (Win7):
C:\Program Files (x86)\EPSON\PrinterDriverTemp\SPR200

THIS LOCATION IS VERY IMPORTANT. YOU WILL NEED THESE FILES FOR THIS SOLUTION.

From the local WinXP machine, I went to Printers and Faxes (can get to from Control Panel), clicked to Add Printer, selected Network Printer, searched, and selected the printer from the list.

Another side note: If the printer isn't in the list, STRONG chance you've got some sharing issues in Win7. In Win7, from Start>> Control Panel>> Network and Internet>> View Network Status and Tasks, click the network type under Active Networks, select the Home or Work, and make sure the settings are allowing printer sharing and such. May require a reboot after updating (which is never a bad idea anyway).

After selecting the printer, it told me that I didn't have the right driver as I mentioned above. So this time I pointed it at the "PrinterDriverTemp\SPR200" folder above, full of confidence that everything would work.. and... FAIL. I got this error kind of like this:
Cannot find the driver for Epson Stylus Photo R200 (M) in this location.

Um... WTF? I re-verified my download from the Epson website. It was good. I checked several other things I thought could be it, but nothing was it.

Ok then, so I went back to the Win7 host PC to see if there were some sharing issues. I clicked on Start>> Devices and Printers. I right-clicked on the Epson printer, and selected Printer Properties. I then selected the Sharing tab. "Share this printer" is checked. "Render print jobs on client computers" is checked. I updated the name of the printer just for kicks and rebooted. No luck. Same outcome.

Then I noticed that the Sharing tab has a button for "Additional Drivers". There is an option in there for x86 computers. I checked it and hit OK. It then prompted me to select the location of the x86 drivers. Just for completeness sake, I went back to the Epson website, redownloaded the WinXP drivers. Went through the stupid unpacking process again which I cancelled after the files were copied. Then I pointed the "Additional Drivers" driver dialog to that folder, and hit OK. I got (basically) the same error on the Win7 machine as the WinXP one:
"The specified location does not contain the driver Epson Stylus Photo R200 (M) for the requested processor architecture."

SOLUTION
In the folder I mentioned above (where the Epson driver files unpacked), there is an .INF file. "E_DF18HA.INF" to be exact. And, basically, INF files describe to Windows how to install something. They are just text files, they can be easily opened in any text editor.

It appears that Epson has mis-labled the Epson Photo Stylus R200 in their download package. In the INF file, lines 23-25 are this:

[EPSON]
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 Series" = EPNDRV,USBPRINT\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 Series" = EPNDRV,LPTENUM\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0

This is more or less meaningless, or should be, and should be seemless. But Windows is looking for "Epson Photo Stylus R200 (M)" and it finds "Epson Photo Stylus R200 Series".

So what I did, which is probably obvious at this point, was to change the word "Series" to "(M)" on both lines. The new lines 23-25 were now this:

[EPSON]
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 (M)" = EPNDRV,USBPRINT\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 (M)" = EPNDRV,LPTENUM\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0

I saved edits, re-browsed to the INF file, hit OK, and it accepted it!

I got a "Windows Can't Verify Publisher" message, but I hit continue. I knew the files came from the official Epson website, so I wasn't concerned. After the continue, the computer sort just sat there for a minute, but then it eventually (2 minutes) finished everything.

I was on the Win7 machine hosting the printer at this point, under the "Additional Drivers" section on the Sharing tab of the Printer properties dialog for the Epson R200 adding a driver for x86. I wanted the host PC to be able to serve up the drivers to the networked PCs.

After this successful installation on the Win7 machine, I was able to go to the WinXP PCs, add the printer, and the driver was installed automatically for me from the Win7 host. It also installed seemlessly on the Win2003 Server x64 PC as well.

I have not tried this text edit on a WinXP machine. The manual install might work there after making this edit, but I don't know.

I don't know why Epson's driver file is jacked up, but the little edit worked!

Wow. I am impressed! Nice work.
Lets see if that works for other Epson drivers and the OP too.

Oh and welcome to the forum jwatts1980!

Epson Printer problem

Hi jwatts1980,

Many thanks for the long, but clear and very infomative reply - I clearly need to study you reply carefully and follow your advice.

Again many thanks.

Good find on the Epson gaff jwatts1980.

Thank you "jwatts1980", good find, it worked a treat for me.
To recap, you just need to open "E_DF18HA.INF" in Notepad and edit these two lines from

[EPSON]
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 Series" = EPNDRV,USBPRINT\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 Series" = EPNDRV,LPTENUM\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0
To
[EPSON]
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 (M)" = EPNDRV,USBPRINT\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0
"EPSON Stylus Photo R200 (M)" = EPNDRV,LPTENUM\EPSONStylus_Photo_R2C5C0

thanks so much jwatts1980! I was getting so frustrated with the problem, then I searched and found your post.