Now that was an interesting challenge:
I have a home-network with a small back-up server that has my Canon MP780 printer attached via USB. That server runs
Windows XP prof. 32 bit and was used as a printer-server in my network. Worked like charm with my other machines (all on Win XP 32bit).
Now I have acquired a ASUS N71JA laptop with Windows 7 64 bit and wanted to do the same: using my remote printer an my server.
- I found the printer on the server
- I wanted to install the necessary drivers
- and BLAMMM!!!: driver not found
Well, well I thought for myself: just go over, connect directly (via USB) to the printer and see if you can install the Win7 drivers on my laptop. Yep, correct, no prob!
Back on my network my next attempt to connect remotely to the printer failed like the first time: no drivers
That was yesterday night. I put the problem and my mind to a rest, thinking to myself that the different operating systems were the culprit. As it turned out, I was only half right.
After a few good hours of sleep I returned to the open issue at hand and did some googling with "Remote printer on XP PC does not print jobs from Windows 7". There were many people having the same problem, but one article did it for me:
http://www.labnol.org/software/share-pr ... ters/9530/
I learned from that that my problem was the different Windows driver models of 32bit and 64bit
and that I could install additional drivers
on my printer server for the shared printer. Wow, I never new before that there was an option for this. Now I got my hopes up
What did I do:
- I went to the Canon-US website and downloaded 64bit drivers for my trusty old MP780, this time for WinXP-64bit (remember, the Win7-64bit driver was already installed on my laptop for direct printing). Oh and btw.: Those drivers could not be found on the German Canon site
- Than I went to my server and unpacked the drivers. Just for fun I unpacked both: the WinXP-64bit and the Win7-64bit drivers, just to be prepared to whatever might happen later...
- Now it was time to open the printer properties, sharing, and click “Change Sharing Options.” Check the box that says “Share this printer,” and then click the button that says “Additional Drivers".
- Next it was no surprise to see only one x64 option, namely for Windows XP. Why did I expect to see a Win7 listet here
- Ok, select that option and the server asked for the location of the drivers to install (you have unpacked the driver to a place you remember, didn't you?)
- Now comes the hard part: which 64bit drivers to install? Remember I was working from a Win7 laptop on a XP server. Well, I will never know whether both would have worked equally because the first one I installed worked perfectly: the WinXP 64-bit driver
That's it guys and gals: My first foray into multiple driver territory.
PLUG:
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