The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

A caller had a question about how to “see” his printer, and print to it, from his Mac, given it’s connected to his Windows machine by USB.

I thought that we had answered this question before, however, I see that while we did answer a Mac-Windows printing question earlier this month, we did not answer this specific question! [see this May 3 MacWork.com article about cross-platform printing ]

The straight-forward answer is probably:

Check our our WGN page here: http://WGN.OnDeckTech.com

Tonight we have Jason Snell from MacWorld on the air with us, and the lines are packed with Mac listeners! Thanks.

Carol called, and it sounds like, given she can print to her HP, that she should try installing the HP printer drivers onto her laptop. She’s getting gobbledy-gook when she tries to print. It’s good she’s getting *something*, as it means she can “reach” the printer across the network. That it’s indecipherable may be because the printer driver is incorrect. A driver is a piece of software (program, or code) that tells your computer how to communicate with another device, in this case, the device is a printer. If you don’t have the right driver, your computer may not be able to communicate properly with the device in question (again in this case an HP printer).