Printing on a Windows Printer in OS X

1550 days ago in Ask iBAM by Brent | 5 Comments

Here’s another quickie for the “Ask iBAM” crew out there. This one’s from Bob and he’s trying to print on a shared windows printer from his Mac on his network. Here’s his question:

I’ve tried and tried and tried to print from my macbook through my network to a printer connected to a Windows desktop. It will find it and show it in the printer pane, but wont print to it. Maybe there is a program that simplifies this? Help if you can.

Thanks much,

Bob

I was under the impression that recent versions of OS X did this semi-effortlessly as long as you had Windows sharing turned on in the system prefs. Then all you need to do is browse for the printer and the OS does the rest. However, he seems to have further issues and I don’t have any way to test this so I’m going to rely on those of you out there with previous experience. Any advice for Bob? Post your comments here and as always, thanks in advance!

  • http://twofivethreetwo.com James Fleeting

    Although I have my printer hooked to the Mac and shared to Windows which is very easy, as you have a macbook that isn’t simple. Here is a site that I found awhile back that has a great article on networking a printer when it is connected to Windows. http://www.myfirstmac.com/index.php/mac/articles/1-printer-for-your-mac-and-pc

  • http://www.designreverb.com Todd Austin

    I just had the opposite problem, printing from my PC to a printer attached to my iMac. That was making me crazy, till I realized that Bonjour has a printer wizard that does it quickly and easily.

  • http://twofivethreetwo.com James Fleeting

    Yeah, I was worried when buying the iMac on how easy it would be to network a new printer that I was also ordering. After reading on Bonjour and installing it on the Vista Laptop it went through the wizard (like 30secs) and set up the printer for networking. Worked perfectly. You gotta love Apple for making it so easy to do things between Mac and Windows.

  • http://www.southwestseo.com Jason

    You can always try IP printing or as suggested use bonjour.

  • http://blog.puscifer.be Kelthas

    I just bought a small printer server which is connected to my router. Everything works fine that way.

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