Well, I was starting to turn all my Windows boxes to 64-bit–all Linux ones are 64-bit already. I expected to see an improvement, but yet to see in practice. Along the way to transform to 64-bit, I had a problem about printer sharing. By the fact that I had network attached printer, you might wonder why I need to share it again. If I told you here that my printer was HP, most of you guys might get it why I prefer to do this way.

1. HP drivers are crap.
2. It comes with a lot of bloatwares.
3. Too many running processes required.

Windows also doesn’t have currently HP printer driver, so I couldn’t print that easily. The advantage of this method is you could just add a shared printer with minimum driver installed on your workstation. Please share if you have a better way to do so.

By the way, Microsoft put some trick making this more difficult than it should be. The idea is when you install the driver on the 64-bit box then share. This is simple. However, this will allow only 64-bit machine to use this shared printer since there is no 32-bit driver or any particular driver for your machine architecture. Simple solution is adding another architecture driver to that. That was an unexpected problem started.

1. Add drivers, then it will ask for driver for the architecture you choose–32-bit in this case.
2. Browse for the 32-bit drivers.
3. Then it will ask for Windows Media (x86 processor) [ntprint.inf file]
4. What the heck is that??
   • I put VIsta setup disc
   • download new drivers
   • find the file in %windir%

Those above don’t help. So, how do we know where and what that files are. I just found that it was located in your x86 machine.

%windir%\winsxs\x86_ntprint.inf_******************

That’s where you need to point to or you can just copy that folder out to 64-bit. That would be fine as well. After this, you’ve done. Sit back and relax. All your machine will be able to use the shared printer seamlessly.

Thanks to the development of network, so that we can live our lives much more comfortable

Note: For sharing printer from 32-bit box to 64-bit one, you just have to get the **_ntprint** folder from 64-bit machine, then add driver as procedure above. You will be all set. =)

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