It’s a miracle that people running XP/Vista can ever get anything done. As friends of mine will know our house is all Mac except for my girlfriend’s HP notebook (which, inexplicably, doesn’t shut down when you close it… but that’s another story). Since I’m sharing a printer, my HP OfficeJet 6200 series, from an Apple Airport Extreme connected to my home network, one would think this would have been a piece of cake. But oh-ho!
The networking stuff used to be the hard part, but Apple’s bonjour makes it easy. But as for installing the correct drivers, the Windows world knows no delimiters of common sense.. Two hours later I had performed the correct sequence of incantations and solved the problem so I thought I’d share the misery with you here in the hopes of saving you an hour or so.
To save the rest of us the same nightmare I endured, here’s how you do it. Note that this assumes you already have Bonjour printing working for the Macs in your household. That’s actually fairly intuitive to set up and I need not cover it here. Here goes:
- You need a driver since whatever printer you’re going to use is likely not a part of your Windows install. Go to the HP web site and download their giant bloatware driver pack for your Windoze box.
- Gone are the days when you could just locate the driver someplace and have Windows install it normally. Once the above pack has exploded itself into your hard drive, you need to “fool” XP into installing the driver. Plug your Windoze machine directly into the printer via USB (hope it’s a laptop!). It should detect the printer and automagically install the drivers. Once done, “Print Test Page” to make sure it works.
- Don’t delete this printer yet, but go ahead and unplug the USB. Instead, install the Bonjour drivers for Windows on to your Windows XP box.
- Open the “Add Printer” tool from the Bonjour folder that now appears in your Start menu. If you’re still connected to the network and the printer’s again connected to whatever Apple device is sharing the printer, your computer should detect it. Since the driver has also been installed, the appropriate driver, in my case “HP OfficeJet 6200 series”, should appear as an option.
- Delete the USB printer and make the Bonjour printer the default from within the Windows “Printers & Fax” menu item.
That’s pretty-much it. It only took me two hours to figure out how to fool Windows into installing the driver, as I couldn’t seem to mine it directly from within the installer or the folders HP placed the drivers into (which I still can’t dig up).
On to my next battle.. hope this helps!
-Ian.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks mate! I was really in need of this article, it made my day! (Y)
I usually do not comment on blog posts but I found this quite interesting, so here goes. Thanks! Regards, P.
Thank-you simply does not say it. Mega thank-you’s might begin to express the gratitude for your post. My battle is finally over and I can now begin my day at 3:41 pm. You having kept me from falling over the edge!! Thanks for the fabulous life-saving!!!
I can find the printer with Bonjour for windows but when I try to print, I get a “you don’t have enough memory message”. Anybody got any ideas?
Thanks
doug kent
Both Mac and PC use TCP/IP. Bonjour runs over TCP/IP. CIFS runs over TCP/IP. If you want things to work together, adopt a common standard. I don’t care who writes it, just make it standard.
Ian,
I was having the same problem as above (probably why I Googled and found your tip) and it has solved my problem. Thank you for your help it was greatly appreciated.
The dominant networking technology is TCP/IP, and it was definitly not written by Microsoft.
It’s also a shame that Mac won’t just use the dominant networking technology written by Microsoft. But no. That would be too easy.
Thanks for this .. I just used the bonjour add printer wizard with a Lexmark driver .. but this was the only place that had some decent instructions. Pity Windows can’t just play nice and use an open protocol like Bonjour built in.
Thank you for saving us the trouble you went through.
Appreciate it, buddy!
Thank you for this post! Worked flawlessly and saved me quite a bit of time.
Thanks again.
Well it must work with your printer because on Vista Bonjour works fine, but on XP it doesn’t. FYI Windows XP printer download install for HP is much smaller then the HP drivers (wait! I thought Macs didn’t use drivers) size for Macs. I like Macs I have one, but Windows is efficient.
Thanks a million: exactly as you described, so clearly.
Thanks for the great information. I ran into this problem today and could not figure it out at all, so this will definitely help out a bunch!
Thanks!
@braulio
I’m the same mate, I can send things to be printed on the mac but they don’t print, their status is ’stopped’ when I look at the print queue on the mac. Did you manage to get anything sorted?
Thank you for the post is very help, however I can’t get it to work… everything seems fine, I followed the steps you gave, the printer is found no problem, I send something to print everything seems fine but… it never prints! any tips?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have been leaving this work until the Christmas holidays to figure out. I will try it sooner than later! Thanks so much. I have really enjoyed reading your blog.
Yay! you’re the man. I wasted 2 hours and then found your post and it worked!