Solved: Wireless Printing xp with Windows 7

I have a home network with my HP desktop computer running Windows XP home edition (SP 3) and an Acer netbook running Windows 7 starter. Internet works great on the netbook. I have a SURFboard cable modem and a LinkSys Wireless 2.4G broadband router. My desktop printer is an HP deskjet 5550 and is hardwired to the desktop computer. I am trying to set up wireless printing. I tried to download drivers for my deskjet to my netbook. Not sure if it worked completely. I have a new icon called hpsfx on my netbook’s desktop (a.k.a. screen). Where to I go from here? Thanks.

 

Etaf, Thanks for your help.
I went to your link and found “How-to Geek” and then the hopeful sentence “ Today we show you how to share a printer from either Vista or XP to Windows 7”. Unfortunately I believe this solution DOES NOT WORK for many users. It DID NOT WORK for me, but it was helpful although possibly not necessary. I had tried the steps suggested previously, but when I retried them my xp Desktop printer was found for the first time on my network as displayed on my Netbook. However, when trying to connect to the printer I got an “access denied” message.
Searching for “wireless printing access denied” on Tech Support Guy lead me to a post by a user named melonhead. Look for his post on 11-Feb-2007 7:11 PM. It worked for me and for several others who had sent email thanks to melonhead.
Melonhead’s solution was for Vista. The main idea is that you need to add a local printer and when asked for a port type \\computer Name\printer name. (Computer name is the name of the xp computer, and the printer name is the name of the printer on the xp, in my case ‘Printer5’.
Here is what I did on System 7. I clicked ‘Start’, then selected ‘Devices and Printers’. On next screen selected ‘Add a printer’. On next screen selected ‘Add a local printer’. On next screen selected ‘create a new port’, left ‘Local port’ as the port type, and clicked ‘next’. I was prompted for port name and entered \\OFFICEXP\Printer5. I was then prompted to install a driver. I choose the HP5550 which installed from the internet. There were a few more choices (nothing hard) including selecting this printer as the default printer.
Thanks again for your response, I would not have made progress without it. If you want to explore this further please contact me, meanwhile I am happy to consider this wireless printing problem as solved.

 

Thanks jlb42 for your explanation - it put me on right track for a slightly different solution. My problem was netbook on Windows 7 starter not recognising printer set up on wireless network (main computer on XP).

I ended up creating a new port on netbook using the same settings from XP computer using the Add Port option on Port tab for the printer once I had installed it.

Note: Using jlb42 tip (making sure I changed network and workgroup names on netbook to match main network) I could find the printer and add it, but the test page would not print at all until I added a new port using the same settings (port name, IP address and protocol) as the current XP computer uses. Now printer shows on the new port and works OK.