I give up....

[thegiraffe]

I've spent a total of three hours in the past two days on the phone with Microsoft and HP tech support...and have made no progress. I was disconnected a grand total of six times, and I'm really tired of people who can't understand me (I speak perfectly clear English).

The problem?

I have a laptop that runs Vista Home Basic (I won the computer for free, I'm not complaining about the OS). We have a wireless network in the house, and I print wirelessly through my desktop. I'm trying to connect to a secondary printer through my dad's desktop...again through the wireless network. The printer is an HP LaserJet 3015 PCL6 all-in-one laser if that matters. Mine is an HP LaserJet 1000 (I'm connected just fine to that). I have the driver for the 3015 installed, and when I try to connect to that printer through the add printer prompt in the control panel, I get an error message that says:

Windows cannot connect to the printer. The current printer driver is not compatible with a policy enabled on your computer that blocks NT 4.0 drivers.

It appears to be a compatibility issue, as my dad's computer (which runs the printer in question) runs XP. My question: is there any way to disable/bypass the policy? I've gone through everything I can possibly think of on the system, googled EVERYTHING I can think of regarding it...all to no avail. Any ideas would be welcome.

Thank you!!!

[JustADude]

Not sure about the policy... but have you tried installing a different driver?

[Mr. Rude]

Looks like you'll have to wait for sp1 for vista (still in beta test ATM)

sorry

[sld72382]

if you're comfortable editing the registry, you open up regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/policies and look in the subfolders for anything that resembles disabling NT drivers. Delete that entry (be sure to make a backup of the registry first!!) and restart, and try installing it again.

[digilight]

Just a thought. Try checking to see if there are Vista drivers for that printer available from HP. You may also be able to reinstall the printer on your dads computer and also allow it instal the Vista drivers at the same time. I want to say that when I have done this before it allows you to instal multiple driver sets if you are going to be sharing/networking it. Then when you try to install it on your computer it will pull the vista drivers from your dads computer correctly.

I again I don't know if this actually works, but I have seen the prompts for it when I have installed various printers here at the shop.

[thegiraffe]

Thanks for all the helpful ideas

My dad somehow "hocus-pocused" it into doing what we wanted it to do. I don't know how, but it now works