Fri Jun 27 09:34:18 PDT 2003 Got a call this morning from one of the Windows users. He was having trouble printing to his home printer from the laptop that I built for him. I'm in California and he is in Illinois - this is going to be fun..... He had an HP officejet. After much discussion, I found out that it was attached to the parallel port on a Dell home computer that he had. The Dell home computer was running Windows ME. He did not know the name of the Dell ME machine, and he didn't know the name of the printer, and when he tried to browse for the printer on the network, it didn't show up. I got him to get the ip address of the ME box by starting a command tool - Note that you have to type "command" in the run box because "cmd" doesn't work - and typing ipconfig. He could ping the ME box from the XP laptop, so that was a good thing. Typing the \\ip_address in the printer wizard resulted in nothing being found. So we went to the ME box and found that the printer was shared as "HP OFFICEJET". Tried typing \\ip_address\HP OFFICEJET into the wizard, but no dice. Went to a dos prompt on the XP box and did a NET VIEW \\ip_address and the printer showed up. Used net use to try to mount it.... didn't work. Hmmmm, quoted the whole thing and it worked - XP doesn't like the space in the name. Now, he went into outlook and tried to print - garbage starts coming out on the printer. Go to properties for the printer in the wizard and the printer is showing up as a canon! Delete the printer from the XP box, and go back over to the ME box - there are two printers configured on lpt1, a canon and an hp, and even though the HP is the one that is shared, apparently ME thinks its a canon because the canon was the first printer added. Delete the Canon printer on the ME box. and Go back to the XP box and try the wizard again - still won't see the printer. Go to the dos prompt and do the NET USE thing again, and it connects, but of course, now the damn thing won't show up in the wizard, even though the NET USE completed successfully. I think that XP remembered that we deleted a printer by that name, so it decided that it shouldn't show the printer in the "printers and faxes" box. Ok, back the the ME box, and unshare the printer. Apply. Back to the XP box and delete the printer using NET USE.... \delete Back to the ME box and re-share the printer - THIS TIME using a name without spaces. Back to the XP box, and the wizard actually sees the printer now! woo hoo! Connect to the printer, and it says that the server doesn't have the correct driver for the printer - So much for windows compatibility. It seems that the ME drivers are way different from the XP drivers. The XP distribution does not have a driver for this officejet, so I tried using the CD that came with the printer, and half way through the install, it says it can't find a DLL, and it wants him to type in the path to the file. He tries to search the CDROM for the file, and the search cannot find the file. Great. At this point, I decide its going to be easier to simply download the latest driver from HP..... The only thing they have is a 22 meg EXE.... ok, download this, and save it to the desktop - 10 minutes later, he clicks on the exe and it prompts him with a place to extract the files, so he clicks finish. Now, he goes back to the add printer wizard and tries to navigate to the location where the dll is - of course it won't let him.... This is beautiful.. It seems that the view settings for him in XP were set to "I'm an idiot, don't show me anything that could possibly frighten me" and that includes dll files. Ok, so after changing the view settings, he still couldn't seem to find the DLL file. This is really getting annoying. Ok, re-extract the exe file - this time to c:\windows\temp Now, go through the add printer thing again, and select the DLL file. Something happenned at this point, where he had to cancel the add printer thing, but it still seemed to create the printer.... Open up outlook and try to print, and it actually worked.... Fricking amazing. Fri Jun 27 11:45:34 PDT 2003 Lets see. A little over 2 hours to add a printer.... Windows is soooooo much easier to use than other Operating Systems..... Just keep telling yourself that, and you'll eventually believe it.