I am having the exact same issue with a client. Same situation, windows XP machine has the printer plugged in via USB and shared. Works fine with windows 7 computers, but if the new windows 8.1 laptop tries to connect, it gives errors saying
it found no driver, and if I try to use a downloaded driver it gets the "cannot connect" error. Does work fine when plugging the printer right into the laptop via USB.
After searching quite a bit for a solution, did find this post about someone having the same issue and fixing it. It seems I cannot post links yet, so will summarize it here:
1. Under devices and printers, hit "Add a printer"
2. When it opens, hit "The printer that I want isn't listed"
3. Check "Add a local printer or network printer with manual settings" and hit next
4. on the Choose a printer port page, check "Create a new port" and choose Local Port.
5. in the Port Name dialogue box, change the name to the network path of the shared printer, IE:"\\xpname\sharedprinter", replacing the placeholders with the actual name of the XP machine that is sharing it, and the printer's shared name from it. Hit OK
6. Should go to the install the printer driver page, find the driver on the list, using windows update if you have to. Can instead hit "Have Disk..." and find the manually downloaded drivers.
7. Will likely come up with a "which version of the driver do you want to use" dialogue if you plugged it in with USB at some point, just use the currently installed driver. Should have a fully installed printer now.
I have not actually tried it yet, but will update this once I'm scheduled to get back out there and complete the ticket. Hope it works, and helps anyone else looking.
- Proposed as answer by
ZigZag3143xMVP, Moderator
Thursday, January 16, 2014 2:16 AM