If someone can help me resolve this I will buy them a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The setup:
One desktop, two laptops. One color inkjet printer, one B&W laser printer.
Everyone plays nice together except one laptop and the laser. It did once, but the laser printer suddenly disappeared and I cannot find it again.
I successfully created a homegroup (Win10) thinking that would fix it. Nope.
I’ve tried searching for the printer, using the troubleshooter, browsing for the printer…just cannot see it from the one laptop.
I thought I could manually install it using the IP address, but I can’t figure out how to determine the IP of the laser. The Google didn’t help me at all.
I am thinking, since one laptop does work with the laser, I could poke around in the settings and try to duplicate them in the other, but I didn’t have any luck with that.
The IP address might be listed on a menu in the settings/info for the printer. It may also be printed on a test/settings page from the printer menu.
You might have some idea of what’s going on via your router. Log into it and see what devices are connected to it. You should at least get a list of IP addresses and you can rule them out by pinging with the printer on and then with the printer off.
If it’s not found and if it’s a wireless printer you can try relinking it with the router via the printer’s menu and the connection button on the router.
Print a test page: Good idea. Will try that.
It is not a wireless printer. It is connected to the desktop via USB. There is no menu window on the actual printer (I got it used, not sure how old it is but it works great with the other laptop and the desktop).
As for the router suggestion: wouldn’t the fact that the other laptop connects with no difficulty (wirelessly) rule that out as a problem?
If the laser printer is only connected to the desktop computer via USB, it’s not directly networked and won’t have an IP address. You should be able to share the printer on the desktop computer and print to it from the laptop computer via the desktop computer. But if the desktop is off, you won’t be able to print to the laser printer.
It’d be nice to know the OS version of the desktop the printer is USBed to and also the OS version of the working and non-working laptop. As well as whether you set all this up before you had a homegroup or after? I think it was set up before, but that’s unclear to hyper-literal me.
Last of all, is the user name and password to log on to the desktop EXACTLY the same as the one used to log onto the various laptops?
Get on the suspect computer. Look up your printer make/model and go to the MFG’s website and download the drivers, uninstall old drivers ( Install downloaded drivers) Find the IP of the printer via your router settings (usually 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1, entered in browser) or try to discern the printer by name by opening START>RUN> type ‘cmd’ and then type ‘netstat -a’ without the apostrophe’s. Once you find the IP address and reinstall the drivers, run the printer setup wizard again, using the IP address, and set the sharing options appropriately. Give it a shot and report back. It usually will resolve this way.
Make sure you also run the setup wizard and check the control panel’s printer options on the computer hosting the printer, rifle through the menu’s and make sure it is shared with all of the laptops.
If the printer is directly connected to the network it will need its own IP address, and this is how you find it. No device comes with it’s own IP address, they are part of the network they are connected to, and need to be allocated by something on the network. (Usually a DHCP server living in your router.) They do come with a MAC address, which is physical network address unique to the device. IP addresses are a quadruplet of numbers separated by dots, ie 192.127.0.1. A MAC address is a sextuplet of hexadecimal digits separated by colons, ie a1:b2:c3:d4:e5:f6. The MAC address is usually on a sticker somewhere on the device, or can be found via a test page or menu item.
However, if the printer is attached via USB, it is up to the host computer to make the print service visible. It can do so via a range of protocols depending upon the operating system of the host computer. But basically you need to share the printer. Other computers will then see the printer via the share on the host computer. So the other computers need to be able to see and access the shared resources on the hoisting computer. Clearly your laptop once did, and now cannot. It may be that it simply can’t see the hot computer anymore, or it may be that it has simply got lost, and a reinstall of the printer system on it will cause it to reset everything and start to work again. Sadly this is something that is all too common on Windows. You could dig down and find the bit that has broken, but simply hitting it with a very large hammer* is often the easiest.
ie a print driver reinstall. A physical large hammer is much more satisfying, but less satisfactory.
I have a similar setup. We only had a succession of colour inkjet printers for a long time; the early ones were not wifi. The current one is wifi and I originally connected it to my desktop by USB cable and my wife’s laptop would only print when my computer was on.
My wife sometimes prints multiple copies of documents (100’s of pages) so we bought a b&w laser printer which is also wifi. That was when I started having trouble with sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t etc.
My solution, by trial and error, was to have both printers set up for wifi only - this seems to have solved whatever the problem was. I still remember how hard it was to set up a printer in the ‘good ole days’ so plug and play, even with the odd glitch, is a massive improvement.
Agreed, it is much easier these days, I remember setting up printers on Windows 3.1 when I was a kid and it is something I never wish on anyone, ‘driver’ installs didn’t even work half the time and had to flip switches on some instead… combine that with doing stuff through DOS… omfg…awful! Ahh the days of WordPerfect and Leisure Suit Larry, you won’t be missed. Anyway OP, if you post the Make/Model I may be able to provide more help, but reinstalling the drivers still will be your best bet to make it work again.
Just today I wanted to try making a “host computer” out of an old Actiontec mi424wr (revision i) that I had lying around from my days with Verizon. This would have saved a few amps over the other option of enabling printer sharing on a laptop with the printer connected by USB. I could hardly believe my luck when I happened to notice the router this afternoon gathering dust on the bookshelf, with its two USB ports distinguishing it from the (apparently more modestly provisioned, hardware-wise) TP-Link router currently serving my household.
It turns out that the stock firmware (developed jointly by Verizon and Actiontec) does nothing to support the two built-in USB ports, either for network storage or network printing. Older models of the mi424wr (revisions A, B, C, and D) can have their operating system changed to openwrt or dd-wrt (embedded Linux), either of which typically has good USB support. The openwrt forums suggested some interest in developing a compatible firmware image a couple years ago, but nothing seems to have materialized. Neither has Verizon made good on its promise to release an updated firmware that enables the USB ports.
I might give Verizon the benefit of the doubt and assume that they just couldn’t get around to assigning developers the task of enabling USB support in this router. More cynically, perhaps the promise of eventually being able to use the mi424wr (revision i) as a low-power “host computer” for network printing or storage was just another instance of vaporware intended to appease those consumers who otherwise would not have gone with Verizon. If you’re interested in that sort of solution to your printing needs, I’d recommend one of the USB-equipped Netgear routers flashed with dd-wrt (a configuration that worked superbly back when I rented a room to a tenant with just such a Netgear router).
After much more farting around I am no closer to a solution.
To address some questions raised in this thread:
Two laptops, one desktop, all running Windows 10.
One color inkjet printer and one B&W laser printer.
The inkjet is wireless, the laser is connected to the desktop via USB.
All the PCs can print to the color.
Only the desktop and one laptop can print to the laser.
My mission is to connect the one laptop to the laser.
Other info:
All are on the same homegroup, which I just created. All sharing is enabled.
I was able to “install” the laser on the bad laptop (or maybe just the driver?) by entering the make and model of the printer. Everything looked peachy - “you have installed…” until I tried printing the test page. No test page. I ran the troubleshooter and it indicated, oddly, that the laser is out of toner (not true); it suggested I replace the toner and re-run the troubleshooter. The other two PCs give no such error message and print fine.
I have not searched for the IP address for the laser because responses in this thread indicated it would not have one, not being wireless.
The fact that the one laptop can print to the laser tells me it is some setting within the non-printing laptop that needs to be addressed. I guess I will again try uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers.
mmm
I’m really doubting your issue is drivers. Drivers come into play only *after *you’ve established that the non-printing laptop can at least see the printer on the hosting desktop.
When you log on to the non-printing laptop, do you use the same username and password as you use when logging on to the desktop that’s hosting the printer? If not then the issue may be that the non-printing laptop is presenting credentials to the hosting desktop that the hosting desktop doesn’t recognize.
This would be a real common situation if Bob’s desktop and laptop both use “Bob” as a user name nd have tgeh same password but Mary’s laptop uses “Mary” instead and with a different password.
If this is your situation, create a new user on the hosting laptop with the exact same user name and exact same password as is used on the non-printing desktop. There’s no need to log on to the desktop as that user (e.g. Mary) except once just to prove the password works. Once this is done and tested, from the desktop check the sharing details for the printer. Assuming it says something amounting to “share with everybody”, then try again to connect from the non-printing laptop.
Thanks, LSLGuy. However, the desktop (directly connected to the printer) prints. The laptop does not print to the printer that is USB-connected to the desktop.
So, to clarify: Should I create a new user on the hosting ***desktop ***with the exact same username and exact same password as is used on the non-printing laptop?
mmm
Also, this may be relevant: The desktop is set up with username/password (admin plus 2 other accounts). The printing laptop is not. The Non-printing laptop is set up with one username/password that is different than any on the desktop.
In other words, the laptop that can print is not set up to require a login/password.
Assuming my diagnosis is the correct one (which your next post indirectly corroborates) it’s like this:
The problem is the laptop that can’t print is saying “Hi there Mr. Desktop. I’m Mary and my password is ABC123. Can I borrow your printer?” And Mr. Desktop is replying “Mary? Never heard of her. Beat it little girl; I ain’t got no printers you can use.”
If you create a user on the desktop machine also named Mary whose password is also ABC123 then the machine-to-machine dialog goes a little better: “Hi there Mr. Desktop. I’m Mary and my password is ABC123. Can I borrow your printer?” And Mr. Desktop will reply “Mary? ABC123? Let me check. Hmm. Oh yeah, you’re a known friend. Hi Mary old pal! Here, help yourself to my printer.”
So once over that hurdle the non-printing laptop will see for the first time that there’s an HP Model 4567XYZ (or whatever) printer available to be borrowed through the desktop machine. Then and only then will the laptop consider whether it already has drivers for that model or needs to go get them and install them.
Once past that hurdle you’ll have a nice shiny new printer icon on the formerly non-printing laptop.