[zaxbat]

I hooked up a brother MFC-790CW fax/scan/printer to my wireless/wired belkin router. I have a desktop that is hardwired to the router and it can access the MFC-790 with no problems and in several different configurations. BUT, the laptop just won't talk to it. WHY? The laptop has no trouble connecting to the router and accessing the internet. I have installed all of the MFC-790 software. The laptop successfully pings each entitiy on my network. So, I'm stumped. The laptop has a Marvel Yukon wireless adapter. Maybe there are some issues there. I don't know. My laptop is using Windows XP. Do I need to upgrade it to Vista or windows 7? I thought that maybe I needed a print server or a residential gateway, but the guys at the geek squad said "no, it should work". I have since found that the MFC-790 has a printer server in it. So that is not the problem. I suspect that the laptop would access the printer just fine if I wired it to the router. So I think that the wireless aspect of this puzzle is where I need to focus. But I can't see why the laptop can access the internet wirelessly through the router but not the printer. Would love any input on this. Thanks.

[JohnWill]

Well, just as a test, try wiring the laptop to the router.

Have you disabled ALL firewalls on the laptop? Can you ping the printer?

[zaxbat]

Yes, all of the firewalls are down and the MAC address is off and the security and WEP mask are disabled. Yes, the laptop can ping the printer successfully. I will try to connect the laptop via wire and see. I suspect that will work fine, but I have to find a spare wire someplace.

[zaxbat]

Seems going to the wire (versus wireless) did not help. The laptop still will not talk to the printer. But it still does access the internet with no problems.

[JohnWill]

Since you can ping the printer, let's try this.

This is a procedure that may work for installing network printers when the normal install doesn't work properly.

1. Select: Control Panel, Printers, Add Printer
2. Choose Add Local Printer.
3. Uncheck the box marked :Automatically detect my PnP printer.
4. Click Next
5. Select Create a New Port and leave the default in the drop down selection as Local Port.
6. Click Next
7. Windows displays a small dialogue box asking a port name.
8. Key in: \\<computer_name>\<printer_name> See note below
9. Click OK
10. Windows will show a list of printer vendors and models. The list looks just like the Windows Add Hardware Dialog. Select your printer manufacturer and printer model from the list. If your specific printer isn't shown, you can click on Have Disk and browse to the folder where you have the unpacked drivers for your printer.

Note:

<computer_name> - Computer name from Control Panel, System status display.
<printer_name> - The actual name of the network printer viewed by browsing to the shared printer on the network.