So, me and my dorm(mate?) decided that we were going to bypass printing costs at the university by bringing our own printer and save a trip down to the residence hall basement to get our printed items. The entire dorm is connected through ethernet using a 10/100 line. Cat3, I think. We're using a Cisco Systems 5 Port Switch to connect his XP PC and my Vista Laptop to the net. The connection seems fine and well, but we've been running into trouble sharing the printer. I hooked it up to his PC and installed it as a network printer (A Dell Photo 926). All's fine and well with the printer printing from the PC but the laptop (Vista) can't find the printer on the network.

Now the dilemma: The PC shows up fine on the network, but under a different icon. It's being recognized as a "connected media player". I've gone into XP to try to change it to be recognized as just a normal PC but Vista doesn't seem to like cooperating with it's own brethren Nothing I do in Vista can change it, and seemingly so, nothing in XP either. Any suggestions/alternative routes to making the computers recognize each other?

I ended up getting an IOGear print server because of various problems trying to share a printer and no more problems. I run it through my router but not sure how you'f hook it up given you're running through the U system. Could give it a try, my was $50 but you can get them for as low as $40 or so.

My being a college student, and almost inherently, poor for that matter doesn't let me buy stuff without it being an absolute need. I know there is a way around our little dilemma but it just doesn't want to show itself to us. I'll continue looking for a way though