How do I share my printer with my desktop and a wireless laptop?
Hi – this is fairly easy with XP. On the desktop, click Start, Printers and Faxes, right-click on the printer icon, and choose Sharing – it will warn you about security risks, and ask if you want to share it anyway. You will need to give the printer a share name – choose something short and easy like HP or HP5870. Now you need to know the name of your desktop – right-click My Computer, choose Properties, click on the Computer Name tab, and memorize the “Full Computer Name” – I’ll use “bobspc” as an example. Now go to the wireless laptop, click Start, Run, and enter: \\bobspc where bobspc is your desktop’s Full Computer Name. It should open a window that has HP5780 (your share name from above), right-click that, and choose Connect. Since both PC’s are XP, the laptop will load the driver from the desktop PC, and you should be good to go. If this fails, you go back to the Computer Name tab, and check the “Workgroup” entry – the workgroup should be the same for both the desktop and laptop.
