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My laptop that I use for schoolwork and university payroll work runs Windows Vista Business SP1 with all the latest patches blah blah blah. The office I work in at my university has an old Macintosh computer running Mac OS 10.3.9 (I verified this in the control panel).

I did some Googling and found that the Bonjour Service (the one that annoyingly gets installed with iTunes that I always end up disabling) is meant to help with Mac-PC networking. So I install Bonjour and its printer wizard. However, even though the Mac is set up to allow Windows sharing and also share printers, the printer attached to the Mac (an HP DeskJet 840C) does not show up in Bonjour.

Okay, so I can add the printer through Vista's control panel, right? I go to the Printers section and type in the IP of the Mac (it's a 10.x.x.x range private IP). The printer installs correctly, although I have to manually select the driver for Vista to use. I can see the printer in the control panel on my Vista laptop, and I can even send print jobs to it (or even test pages). However, nothing ever comes out!

I've tried the following:
1. Install Bonjour
2. Set the Mac's name to be one word
3. Set the printer's name on the Mac to be one word
4. Changed a Vista security policy, "Network security: LAN Manager authentication tool" to "Send LM & NTLM, use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated."
Note: By changing this last option I got rid of a previous headache, which was that every time I tried to connect to the Mac, my PC threw a logon box in my face. No matter what I typed, authentication failed. By doing the security option change, this problem went away.

Any ideas as to why I can't seem to get anything out of the printer even though it shows up in my control panel as ready to go?

what happens when you try to print something?

Absolutely nothing. That's the problem. The printer icon in the Vista tray never appears, and nothing comes out of the printer.

can you try just installing the software on your mac?

martini161 wrote:can you try just installing the software on your mac?

The reason I have my laptop is because it allows me to work on my office tasks in Microsoft Word 2007 (which is so much easier to use than Mac Office 2004) while someone else uses the Macintosh computer, thus doubling office productivity.

I need to share the printer from the Mac to the PC. No using the Mac to do my work, no buying additional equipment or playing games with USB flash drives or printer cables! I just need the computers to play nice over the network!

theres no way i know of that will let a windows computer share drivers with a mac machine, you could do it if you had a print server, but i think you might just have to install mac drivers on your mac machine

martini161 wrote:theres no way i know of that will let a windows computer share drivers with a mac machine, you could do it if you had a print server, but i think you might just have to install mac drivers on your mac machine

Please explain what you mean by "install mac drivers on the mac."

install drivers from your printer on the mac, and have the printer on the network. actually, im not sure i understand your situation. is the printer connected to one of your computeres via usb cable or is it connected to a router or switch with an ethernet cable?

well carp i was actully just reading the posts again and realized ive kinda had this back ward the whole time now i can see why you are confused! well i have no idea as to how to fix your problem because i have no experiance working with macs. the only thing i could think of is to set up a print server on an old machine and put all the printing drivers through there

You tried googling and trying things like this?

http://members.cox.net/18james/osx_printer_sharing.html

Dan

DMB2000uk wrote:You tried googling and trying things like this?

http://members.cox.net/18james/osx_printer_sharing.html

Dan

I've googled for hours. Nothing (including your link) has produced anything any different from what I've described (it installs, but I can't actually print to it).

does your printer have an ethernet port?

Nope. It's an HP DeskJet 840C... USB (and probably parallel) only.

you might want to either invest in a print server or make one yourself with an old comp you have laying around

So sharing between my Vista PC and this Mac is not possible via software then?

it may be, but it seems to me like it wouldnt be worth all the time and effort. considering that macs and pcs dont play nice well in general (for good reason) plus that fact that its vista in the first place makes me think it would be extremely difficult

Well, I sort of solved my problem. I made sure the Mac's and PC's workgroups matched, made sure Windows could see the Mac, then browsed Network. I told it to Connect to the printer on the Mac. Obviously, there was no printer driver installed, so I selected Generic -> MS Publisher Color Printer. It works, sort of. I say sort of, because I cannot change the print quality. We do everything on Draft to save ink and time, but it outputs either Normal or Best (can't tell which, but I held it next to a Draft of the same document and it was noticably different). Any ideas on that? Also, this apparently is a PostScript driver.