Member Avatar for normanallen

I have a desktop running XP SP3 which has my printer connected via a parallel cable. My son has a notebook running Vista. We have his internet connection working via my wireless router (Belkin).
He asked for printer sharing to be set up. Both machines are now in the same Workgroup, and the printer is shared on my machine.
When I went to install the network printer it picked up the Bluetooth connection (I had a Bluetooth dongle in one of my USB ports).
When I try to print something from his machine, the printer queue on my machine says "Spooling" and then it disappears (and nothing prints). This keeps cycling every minute or so, I'm still not sure how I stopped this. The notebook installed the correct printer driver.
Q1: Why is this happening, and what can I do about it?
Q2: Should I remove the Bluetooth dongle, delete the "Network printer" and try again to use the Wi-Fi connection?
Q3: What else might need to be done to get it working?
He has Works installed on the notebook, and doesn't want to have to go to the trouble of converting it to a doc (that my XP Office recognises) putting on a memory stick and reading from my machine/ You can see where he's coming from.

Any suggestions welcome.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by OlyComputers
Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I would share it through wifi instead of bluetooth. You'll have better range and all around better support/functionality, but you shouldn't have to remove the dongle, just connect over the network rather than directly via bluetooth when setting up the printer on his laptop.

How old is this printer? Vista can have trouble with older printers and if this is connected via parallel there may not be a vista driver for it (especially if his laptop is running the x64 version).

Try connecting it through the network if it doesn't show up automatically when adding the network printer from his laptop click "my printer wasn't listed" and manually enter the printer (//server/share name).

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