A few months ago, I picked up an HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni and hooked it up to BigDawg, my Windows XP box that's been a trooper for several years. The printer's happy and works like a champ.

Then, I ran into some issues trying to get TopDawg (running Windows7 RC) to print. After some research, I followed some directions that had me crackin' a couple of Registry settings and everything was finally working - a Windows7 (RC) box printing across the network to a Color LaserJet mounted to an XP box and shared out to the network. Good stuff... just like it's supposed to (albeit with some Registry hacks that people shouldn't have to do).

As I mentioned in February, Microsoft decides they will turn-off support for Windows7 RC in March - no biggie... I'll just run without support. Wrong, what Mr. Gates meant to say was, "No more support for Windows7 RC... and it won't work anymore either without nagging the crap out of you every two hours to send me your money." Oh... well... since you put it THAT way... Bleh.

Yeah... I caved and bought Windows7 Ultimate for TopDawg. What can I say, I like Windows7 so far, and couldn't see going back to XP full-time. So you'd think it would be a matter of just dropping the Windows7 DVD in and let it install all the new stuff onto the hard drive and no worries about losing anything. Wrong. It demanded a complete reload and wiped everything out (OK... well, it renamed all of the important stuff into something that was a PITA to find).

After getting Windows7 running like it's supposed to (which is pretty nice, BTW), I found the need to print something. No problem - I'll just download the latest Windows7 drivers from HP and install them. Silly me - there are still no Windows7 drivers for this printer. Huh?! OK - well, I should be able to use standard drivers since the printer's installed on an XP machine, right? Nope - Win7 won't even recognize the fact that there's even a printer shared out there on the network. What?! Seriously?! Crap!

So I lived with just saving my print stuff to a share on the BigDawg and printed from there... but that's kind of a hassle, so I decided to give this whole thing another shot today. After several attempts at re-downloading the same stuff I already had, re-installing those drivers again, and checking all of the sharing parameters for the network, I went online and did some more research into installing and printing across the network. Turns out, that Windows7 STILL does not really work and play well with others (no doubt, Microsoft's attempt to herd the sheeple away from anything XP or older).

Not having any part of that (and not wanting to buy another $300 copy of Windows7 for BigDawg), I did some more reading and came up with installing the printer to a completely new port, and manually programming the network share for the printer into its 'location' entry (an old 'XP, "don't-know-what-else-to-do-to-get-this-thing-running" trick' for network printing). That seems to have solved it. Pisser that it has to be such a jacked-up way to set things up though. Most people will wind up paying The Geek Squad WAY too much money to have them attempt the same thing, give up, then sell them a new printer when there's nothing wrong with the one they already have.

Still gotta get my MacBook Pro to be happy living in the Windows network environment, though. Maybe I'll throw it a bone and install Unbuntu or Fedora onto BigDawg and make it my central server. I don't know... maybe later, we'll see.