Trouble connecting to Win10 shared printer.

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kiwifidget

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#196818 13-Jun-2016 22:01

A local charity I volunteer at has just upgraded its 2 main office desktops to Windows 10. The dozen laptops they have for client use were upgraded a while ago.

One of the office pc's has a USB connected printer that was shared so all the other computers could use the printer. I think that PC is now Win10Home.

The Win10 upgrade bolloxed up the printing and I had to re-install the printer on all the other computers.

This went fine till I got to the last two. They just dont recognise the computer or the printer. I used the option where you type in \\computername\printer for connecting.

That was Saturday. I went back in today and they still wont detect the shared printer.

Why would something work perfectly fine for 1 desktop and 10 laptops and then consistently fail from that point onwards?

There is no domain or Homegroup, just a bunch of computers on a network.

Any suggestions for a fix would be most appreciated.

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nathan

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#1571374 14-Jun-2016 04:05

have you done basic troubleshooting like

ping computername

start, run, \\ip.address

lxsw20

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#1571375 14-Jun-2016 04:50

This could be unrelated, but isn't the maximum size of a workgroup, 10 machines?

kiwifidget

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#1571383 14-Jun-2016 07:02

lxsw20:

This could be unrelated, but isn't the maximum size of a workgroup, 10 machines?

I wondered about this, but they were all working before when the PC was Windows 7.

And isnt the 10 concurrent? After re-installing the printer on the other computers I shut them down, so there were only 4 on when I got to the last two.

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1101

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#1571568 14-Jun-2016 11:55

What happens when you try just \\computername
Can you connect, is that PC name not recognized , do you get a login/pass required box ?

Try:
give the pc with the printer a static IP & connect using its static IP \\static-ip-number
try the add printer wizard instead (sometimes this works better)
Do the printers have built in network ports that you could use instead ?
uninstall any 3rd party firewall on that machine that wont connect (incl av that has built in firewall)
uninstall any 3rd party firewall on the PC with the printer

in a cmd prompt (dos box) on the PC that wont connect: net use
see what comes up with that .

ObidiahSlope

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#1571598 14-Jun-2016 12:39

Become a command line ninja and use Powershell. Useful commands are Get-Printer and Get-Printerport

You can then use Add-Printerport and Add-Printer if required.

Obsequious hypocrite

kiwifidget

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#1571609 14-Jun-2016 12:51

Thanks for the tips.

I'll try those out sometime in the next few days when I am next in the office.

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kiwifidget

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#1572176 15-Jun-2016 10:09

Had a quick bash at this last night.

The troublesome laptops can ping the Win10 (and it is Pro, not Home as I originally thought) PC that is sharing the USB connected printer.

I even managed to get the username/password box to pop-up after manually entering \\computername\printer into the add printer wizard.

Only to get this "The credentials supplied are not sufficient to access this printer. Do you want to specify new credentials?".

Firstly, the credentials I used is the only account on the PC and it is an administrator account. There is no other account with "more sufficient" credentials.

Secondly, it's the same credentials that was used on the other 11 machines that worked. So that makes no sense whatsoever.

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