I do helpdesk for a medium sized office. One of our departments is entirely a Mac house, except for two users who each have both a Mac desktop and a Windows laptop. One of these users needs to be able to print to a printer connected via USB to a nearby Mac, from his Windows laptop. The Mac is running OS X 10.3.9, the laptop Windows XP SP1.

So far I have gone into System Preferences -> Sharing and enabled Windows Sharing. I have also enabled printer sharing, the other Macs can print to it just fine. The laptop in question can see the printer, but print jobs fail. I have tried connecting it as a local printer via TCP/IP port (using the Mac's IP address) and as a network printer (192.168.71.95\Epson etc...). Connected by the former I get "The document failed to print" and by the latter nothing happens, everything just sits there. Windows thinks it is printing, but nothing happens - any ideas?

[MacsWork]

Install Bonjour on the PC.

[christm]

i installed bonjour - and worked fine for a couple of months and now cant get it work form my windows pc but yet again my mac just carried on working with no problems!

grrrr

any ideas?

[MacsWork]

Probably a Windows security patch killed it,...no doubt.

Here's what I did to get it working:

1) Enabled Windows Sharing on the Mac, and shared the printer
2) Got the IP address of the Mac
3) On the laptop, ran the Add Printer Wizard. Added it as a Network Printer: \\192.168.71.95\EPSON etc...
4) When prompted to install a driver for the printer on the laptop, used Apple Color Laserwriter's driver, already included in the list of available Windows drivers.