I have a laptop and I have a desktop PC with a new printer connected via USB. The old printer (HP) could be accessed from the network. My wife was printing from any room in the house with the HP connected to my PC. I purchased a USB Kodak ESP 3250 and now she cannot print. I cannot get it to print via Ethernet cable either. She can only print using a direct connection like I am using at the desktop. (USB).

I have worked on this for two days and was in the registry last night following MS instructions for my error codes.
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Any ideas or help. I plan to take the printer back and get a wireless printer. Would that be a good idea or should I make this work like the HP did? After all the old printer did just fine.

Thanks John

When you set up the printer on ethernet, first set a fix ip address in the range of your computers, also be sure your network has a workgroup name and that is also entered in the printers network software. Robert

Can't you just share the printer over your network?

That is what I was doing before and expected to do with this new printer. I had to do nothing special before, just set printer sharing on the desktop where the printer is connected by USB. That was it. Her printer would print to my connected printer and show John-PC "Printer Name". As the default printer on her lap top.

I am going to reconnect the HP, just to see.

Her PC cannot find my Pc or my printer with the new Kodak printer. The printer works fine with each PC if they are USB connected.

I never had to set up the laptop/printer with an ethernet cable. All I did was set my desktop to share printers in network sharing center and she was able to print through the router and my PC. I was so simple the first time I did this. This problem is new and only started when I bought this new printer. It's an all in one deal, print, scan, copy. It works fine connected with USB.

I have had LAN problems I couldn't fix and made them go away by going into control panel/system/hardware/device manager/network (right click on the card) and uninstalling the adapter. Then reboot and let it reinstall. That refreshes all of the drivers, software adapters and DHCP connections. Things that were broke, start working again after a second reboot.

All-in ones are a different story. They are bi-directional printers. If they have a print server built in, most will do all, ( print,scan, etc) by way of the network from any computer. You MUST install the drivers on all the computers. Most will not pass them between computers. Many also have to talk (thru the network )to one computer. You direct all other computers to talk to that computer to print. You did not say what OS is on your computers. Printing from a XP computer to a W7 machine can bring other issues in to play. Most all in one will print from other computers but some will not scan to another computer. Robert

He should have been prompted for that when he added the network printer to the other machines. If he never added the new printer and tried to print to the old, non-existent printer it certainly would not work.

What model of printer are we talking about, and what OSes are installed on the respective computers?

Sounds like the issue is that the laptop is not finding your desktop. Make sure that you are using the same workgroup name.

Sorry for not getting back to the thread until today. The issue is corrected but not resolved. I got pissed off and took the printer back. While at the store I went with the Kodak 5250 instead as it had USB and WIFI. While setting it up it does tell you to load the drivers (set up cd) into each machine on the network.
When I loaded the software onto the wife's laptop, it asked for the connection type and all I had to do was set it for wireless. The router then found the printer and all is well except I am printing wireless and did not really solve the real issue. Before I was printing to the network, now I am printing directly to the printer. It could very well been not paying attention when installing the first printer.

Thanks for the all the help............John

You were not printing to the network before. You were printing to the printer by sending the data OVER the network TO the computer that was connected directly to the printer, and then IT was sending the job to the printer. Now you are doing it a little more efficiently by bypassing the computer, but still sending TO the printer OVER the network. You never send things TO your network; it is a pathway, not a destination.