network printer problems with g3

[excalibur313]

I have an old powermac g3 running panther that I'm running into printer troubles with. I want it to connect to a shared printer on a dell running win xp. I have another dell (dell 2) that connects fine and the g3 used to work but I had to change work groups for both the mac and the dell so that the dell 2 would see the first dell. The funny thing is that the mac sees dell 2 fine but it doesn't see the first dell. I tried typing in the ip address and setting it up that way but it didn't really work. How can I go about getting the mac synched up without screwing up the connection between the dells?

 

[MisterMe]

OK. You have gone on and on about the Dells, but you make absolutely no mention of the printer you want to use. What kind of printer is it? Have you read and followed the instructions in the MacOS X Help menu for printing to a Windows-shared computer?

 

[excalibur313]

The reason why I didn't mention the printer is that I thought that since os x probably uses cups then it doesn't really matter. It is a lexmark b/w laser printer connected via a usb. To clarify I had it working perfectly until I had to change both the mac and the dell to be in a different workgroup. I did go through the help but it doesn't help. Thank you so much for your help!

 

[MisterMe]

The reason why I didn't mention the printer is that I thought that since os x probably uses cups then it doesn't really matter. It is a lexmark b/w laser printer connected via a usb. To clarify I had it working perfectly until I had to change both the mac and the dell to be in a different workgroup. I did go through the help but it doesn't help. Thank you so much for your help!

First, you don't have a lexmark b/w, you have a specific model Lexmark printer such as the Lexmark E120n or Lexmark T644. Second, your printer is not connected to your Mac via USB. It is connected to your Windows computer via USB. To your Mac, your printer is networked. It is likely that you will have to use a CUPS driver via Windows printing. However, without knowing which printer you have, there is no way to know if a CUPS driver is available for it.

 

[excalibur313]

It is a lexmark e240 which has PCL 6 emulation. I think that we both know that it is connected via usb to the dell and not the mac since I wouldn't have this problem if it was directly connected. I'm sorry that I was not entirely clear but it seems like we are both pretty advanced users who know the basics of a network so I didn't include some of the apparent details. For what it is worth I brought in my macbook and it too couldn't see the dell computer in the mshome workgroup but it could see all the other computers in the workgroup. I guess what I'm getting at is since the sharing is enabled for the printer is there a way with os x to type in an ip address followed by the shared printer name to find it? Like I said before, this was working great until I had to change the workgroup all the computers were in so that the dell could talk to the other dell. (The reasoning for that is because it is hooked up to an instrument that requires a particular workgroup.) Thanks again for your help!