Tech Challenge

I am so proud of what I managed to do this morning.

I have been trying for almost a year to make it possible for GA's laptop computer to send files to our printer. In theory, it's supposed to be easy. She just looks at the network, selects the printer, makes it the default, and off she goes. The instructions published on the MS website say so.

But this is Windows XP fighting with Windows Vista. You see, I have Vista on my desktop in the study, and she has XP on her laptop in the living room. The printer is connected to the router via an ethernet cord, not tied directly to the desktop machine. The Vista machine can see it, and has logged it as the printer with no problems. But the XP machine... nope, can't even see it.

I Googled and Googled, looking for any possible solution, and I found dozens and dozens of people trying to find a solution on various forums. They were given all sorts of suggestions - make sure both the printer and the laptop have a share name with eight characters or less with no spaces, have it look for the location as \\computer\printer substituting the network share names, have it look for the IP address, make sure the IP address of the printer and laptop match the address that the router assigns them (how in blazes would they not? It's the router that assigns this!), install the printer driver on the laptop before trying to see it on the network... the list goes on and on. And nothing works.

Then I dug deep into the help files on the Vista machine looking for this problem. There, I found an article that explains that the XP machine has to have an LLDT installed. It's basically an overlay or hotfix or upgrade that lets the XP machine respond to a Vista inquiry. If you Google that, you'll find several uses of the acronym, but you have to disregard everything that doesn't mean Link Layer Topology Discovery. And you'd better be prepared to do a lot of research, because Microsoft doesn't make this one easy, though it should have been obvious that this was going to be a problem.

Seems that they produced a fix that you could simply run in Service Pack 1 and 2, but if you have Service Pack 3, as most people with XP do by now, it won't work. You'll try it from several different directions using the MS website, but after a while you realize that their website is linking to itself in a circle, and you're going round and round following their crazy instructions.

But at least now I had the information I needed. I knew that I somehow had to get that LLDT installed on the XP machine - I just couldn't do it using Microsoft's instructions.

The solution? Download and save the file they offer for SP1 or 2, ignoring the link for SP3 provided, then find a geeky website that explains exactly how to manually extract the various files from the darn thing. You'll be running the command line from outside Windows, and moving various files to various folders under Windows sys32. And you'd better do it exactly as the geek tells you, which I did. And I'll be darned. It worked. Oh, granted, it still didn't find the printer using XP's printer search function, but it did allow me to enter \\computer\printer (substituting the share names of course) and thus make it work with the laptop.

But I still wonder why the wizards at Microsoft felt that the most up to date version of XP would never be used with a Vista machine in the same home. They were so sure about this that they didn't bother to even give us a way to do this upgrade without finding a geek somewhere to guide us through it. The good news is that it gets us used to finding geeks and ways of getting around the crap they sell us. See "hacking" for more details.
Heh heh.