HP 7960 - Workgroup Printing not sharing

[David B]

Hello! Using HP Photosmart 7960 as shared printer off of XP Pro SP2 machine.
Works great for the other XP machines that share it. Tried to connect (via
network share) my (new) 64Bit Vista Home Premium box to this printer. Of
course, it asked for the Vista printer drivers, which do exist.

So, the challenge - the drivers won't install on the XP machine, as they are
Vista drivers and error out (simple message saying wrong OS). Installed the
drivers on the Vista machine, which should solve the problem...it didn't.
Went thru both HP directories (under x86 programs) looking for the *.inf
files and according to Vista, none of them are correct. I've tried them all.

Any ideas or help is appreciated! Thanks! David.

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Which drivers did you install on the Vista PC. It's looking for 64 bit
drivers which you need on the Vista PC, not 32 bit ones.

Of course I installed the 64bit drivers!

The .inf files don't seem to be under the HP directories.

I have this exact same problem, does anyone have an answer?

[tsberry]

When I contacted HP support they said sharing was not supported between
the two operating systems. This won't be much help, but so far here is
what I've determined. On the XP machine, the driver is identified as a
Photosmart 7900. If you install the local (not network) printer driver
on the Vista x64 machine, it will be identified as a Photosmart 7960.
For one thing even if the dlls were correct, the inf files would have to
be edited so as to "fool" the system into thinking they were the same
printer.

So, for the time being, someone with a better understating of inf files
is going to have to figure out how to edit the 7900 x64 driver into
thinking it's a 7900. Then at least all of us trying to do the same
thing might have a chance.

[terry2s]

I had the same problem and was finally able to solve this. Here's what
I did:

Download the Vista 64 drivers to your Vista 64 machine. Once
installed, Go to Control Panel. Choose printer. Then choose Add
Printer.

Choose Add a local printer. Click on Create a new port. The default in
the drop down box is Local Port. Do not change that. Click Next.

A dialogue box will appear asking for you to enter a port name. Type in
the \\computer name\printer name ie. My computer's name is Vaio and the
printer name is Printer so I typed in \\Vaio\printer

Hope this helps someone as I literally spent hours working on a
solution to this issue.

[Aileron]

Hey Terry 2s - thanks for saving me hours. This tip worked. I typed in the address exactly as stated and left the port as local. It is the only thing that worked for me. I connected a laptop running 64-bit Windows 7 to photosmart 7960 through a networked HP Mediasmart server running Windows Home Server.