[jpmnewyork]

I don't think I've seen this exact problem here -- it's a mixed-platform Mac/PC problem (I think, though maybe it's just a Vista problem) -- and I also don't think I've seen any solutions to similar problems, but hopefully somebody can steer me in the right direction.

I have an Airport Extreme base station with an HP PSC 1610 All-in-One printer wired to it, and can successfully print wirelessly with an iMac, an iBook and a MacBook. But my son has a new Toshiba Satellite Laptop running Windows Vista Premium Home Edition, and though it connects wirelessly to the Internet through the Airport network without any problem, it cannot find the printer. I have downloaded the latest HP driver for Vista to the laptop, but no matter what I do it doesn't "see" the printer when I try to add it to the printer list. Why would it be able to recognize and use the wireless network otherwise, but not recognize the printer?

[jpmnewyork]

Okay, I solved my own problem. Darned if I know how... if anybody cares, it involved going onto the laptop and repeatedly going deeper and deeper into the Add Printer utility, opening things haphazardly in the hope that I was getting somewhere; then getting to a place where it asked for an IP address, where I entered the IP address of the Airport (not the printer, which is what it theoretically wanted) several times and then finally getting to the point where it gave me a list of different printer makes and models and then wanted me to download the driver (which was already installed) until somehow, about a half hour later, it finally listed the HP printer under Printers!

God, I hate PCs. This would have taken about 3 minutes on a Mac.

[EWG]

I share your frustration with PCs. I made the switch to Ubuntu Linux 2 years ago and have never regretted it. I've always found it odd that Ubuntu will almost always recognize a device but Windows only does sometimes. Example: Just bought a Sansa Clip MP3 player. Linux identified it by name as soon as I put in the USB but Vista just referred to it as a 'new device'. There are some frustrations with Linux but the support in awesome.

Thanks for posting your fix.

[jpmnewyork]

Actually -- and I should have posted this a while ago, but have been so frustrated I didn't bother -- I thought I had solved the problem, but I hadn't. Because, even though I succeeded in finally getting the HP printer to show up in the printer list, and everything SEEMS to be configured correctly, I STILL am unable to get anything to print. No error message; jobs just supposedly get sent to the printer and never actually print. So I'm back to having my son do any Word documents for homework on one of the Macs instead in order to be able to print.