Vista - connecting to shared printer in vista

I have a desktop running vista home basic with a dell a940 printer connected
to it
and shared. I have a laptop with vista home basic that I am trying to get to
the printer with. Networking is set up and I can connected to shared
resources on the laptop from the desktop. When I try to get to shared
resources on the desktop, I get an error that the laptop cannot connect to
the pc. I can ping the desktop and windows firewall and the symantec firewall
are both off. All of the network settings seem to be identical. I even
connected the laptop directly to the router and got the same result. Can
anyone shed some light on this? If it was up to me I would upgrade to XP and
be done with it. Unfortunately that is not an option. Any help would be
appreciated.

I found the folowing when doing a Google search on a problem connecting a
Vista laptop to a shared printer on a XP desktop. I wonder if it will work
for you.

"Go to Control Panel. Choose printer. Then choose Add Printer.

ChooseAdd a local printer. Click on Create a new port. The default in the
drop down box is Local Port. Do not change that. Click Next.

A dialogue box will appear asking for you to enter a port name. Type in the
\\computer name\printer name ie. My computer's name is basement and the
printer name is EpsonSty so I typed in \\basement\epsonsty"


"biggdawg" <biggdawg@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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