We attended a trouble call where the customer had two computers running Windows10.
One had an old printer connected to it using a USB cable. She could print with no problem to this older printer.
However, she wanted to share this printer to a new computer over her Wi-Fi network and was not able to accomplish it.
When we arrived at her SOHO, we checked to make sure that she had shared the printer correctly on the old computer and that “file and printer sharing” was activated in the Network and Sharing centre” options.
The only way to get the new computer to connect to the shared printer on the other computer, was to manually add it using the older computer’s name and printer name.
One has to enter the path of the shared printer perfectly otherwise it doesn’t work.
The reason why the older computer couldn’t add the shared printer to the network so that the new computer could see it as a networked printer, was because it was using the USB connection method.
You can see in the photo below how we entered the network path name. After we highlighted the printer, we clicked the “Next” box at the bottom right and the drivers were installed, resulting in the printer appearing in the printer list on the new computer.
