Sharing a Printer Connected to a Computer on Your Wireless Network
open the Control Panels and select”Printers and Faxes”
Then select “Properties”.
Go to the “Sharing” tab. You may or may not see this screen. If your sharing tab looks like the representation above, select the option that you understand the risks and you want to share you printer (bottom link on picture).
select “Just enable printer sharing”, and press “OK”.
Now you should see the general sharing interface for Windows XP. Select “Share this printer” and give it a meaningful name and press OK. Ignore any MS-DOS naming error message you receive because few computers use MS-DOS anymore
In the “Printers and Faxes” control panel, you should see your printer with a hand icon over the icon. This means that it is currently being shared over the network (within your workgroup)
On Another Computer
open the control panels again and click on “Printers and Faxes”. Then select “Add a printer” from the menu on the left.
select “A network printer…” to add the shared printer on the other computer, then click “Next”.
select “Browse for a printer” so we can choose the correct printer to install, then click “Next”.
Now you’ll need to find the printer by first selecting the workgroup (in my example, it’s called “WORKGROUP”) and then select the name of the computer, and finally select the printer and click “Next”. You may have a strange named computer, but most networks are small and it should be fairly easy to find out which computer is which. If you don’t see your computer in the list, you may need to check and make sure that all computers within the network are on the same domain. Changing the domain of a computer is outside the scope of this article but many resources are available online.
Now, the computer will attempt to install the drivers from the other machine. If you’re running a different version of Windows, sometimes these drivers are incompatible (ie, Vista). Click on “Yes” to proceed.
Next, make the selection Yes or No if you’d like this new printer to be you default printer in the programs you use in your computer, then click “Next”.
select “Finish”.
