Comments on: How-to: print from Snow Leopard to a Vista-attached printer

By: macmary

macmary — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:01:11 +0000

I have done all as per instruction but my printer spits our few blank pages instead of printed page.
I have a bit old Brother HL2040
Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

By: Siggi Engelbrecht

Siggi Engelbrecht — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:02:11 +0000

Perfect description, I am impressed! Also works for printers connected to the parallel port of an xp machine. There you do not need, imho, to edit the registry etc. Just offer the printer within the network by right clicking etc. Check whether it worked from yet another pc. Then add the printer to the Mac. The “%20″ trick is pretty neat – blanks in machine names always are a problem.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:20:43 +0000

Thanks so much. I am PC literate, but my wife bought a MacBook a couple days ago and was really anxious to print. I was getting close, but didn’t know about the registry entry and probably never would have figured it out. Wife happy = peace for me.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:30:35 +0000

Awesome. Work perfectly for my Epson and Canon printers connected to my Windows Vista PC. Thanks a lot.

By: Han

Han — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 05:05:53 +0000

This worked! Thank you!

I more or less followed the instructions here to be able to print on my wife’s printer, which is connected to her Vista machine.

1. Modified the vista (home premium) regedit
2. Went to Vista printers, and turned printer sharing on (right click on default printer)
3. Created a new account in Vista (not administrator), with password.
4. Went to my Mac’s printer & fax panel, clicked on +.
5. However, I clicked on “Windows” in the toolbar instead of “Advanced”, found my wife’s PC, and entered the username and password I had set up in Step 3.
6. When printing didn’t work, I changed the printer driver setting (found in “Options & Supplies”), and found the printer.

Hope this helps someone.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:47:53 +0000

OK, my luck has not been so good. I’m trying to print from a wireless Macbook to a Canon MP470 on a USB port of a Vista Machine. Followed directions above (including regedit after which I rebooted), and document gets to the queue as “remote downlevel document” but it just spools forever. I loaded Gutenprint and tried both its MP470 driver as well as the generic postscript driver recommended above, with the same results. Can anyone help? Thanks!

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:29:23 +0000

Hard to believe it but it worked.
In this day and age, it shouldn’t be so hard to set this stuff up…
At least it works I guess.

By: Zeke

Zeke — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:13:24 +0000

If the Windows print queue name has spaces, replace the spaces with %20. Thus smb://myname:mypassword@192.168.2.10/Big printer would need to be smb://myname:mypassword@192.168.2.10/Big%20printer

By: D H

D H — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:07:35 +0000

Worked like a champ! I am new to Macs but very proficient with a PC. I did notice that I had to take out any spaces in my Shared name for the printer. After that I rebooted the PC and was able to connect right up to my Brother DCP-8020 from the MAC. Thank you!

By: Mick Hornbach

Mick Hornbach — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:49:42 +0000

This is great!

The only thing I had to change was the SMB URL line. Instead of adding my PC name I just used the IP without the workgroup name! Like this:
smb://myname:mypassword@192.168.2.10/ML-2510

THANKS!