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Enable Remote Printer Setup for Windows 7

Wondering where your \\windows7 Printers and faxes or Printers icon went?

Posted Thursday Jun 2, 2011 by HarmonatoR

Ran across a frustrating issue lately, and I wanted to post my findings on the 'Net since I couldn't find this info myself. My experience has been with a Windows 7 Professional box on a Windows 2003 domain.

Usually, domain admins can remotely manage printers on XP boxes by simply browsing to \\WinXPComputer and locating the Printers and Faxes icon. With Vista, they turned this feature off by default, but it wasn't too difficult to turn it back on. Now with Windows 7, they changed it again. To activate it, the process is similar to the process in Vista, with one little exception.

Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center

Click on Change advanced sharing settings

Turn on network discovery

Turn on file and printer sharing

Click Save changes and close Network and Sharing Center

Here's the special part for Win7, you must at this point share at least one printer

Go back to the control panel and click on Devices and Printers

Right-click on a printer and click Printer properties

Click the Sharing tab

Check the box to Share this printer, click Apply and then click OK

Close Devices and Printers

At this point, you should be able to Start -> Run... -> \\windows7 from another PC and be able to see the Printers and Faxes icon from XP/2003, or Printers icon from Vista or other Windows 7 boxes. Additionally, it is safe to remove sharing for the printer that you selected, and the Printers and Faxes or Printers icon will still be available from a remote PC.

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Visiting St Louis

A quick weekend trip to St Louis

Posted Sunday Aug 8, 2010 by HarmonatoR

The family and I decided to make a weekend trip out to St Louis. We all had a pretty good time out there, and discovered that there was a lot more to see and do than we had time, so we'll definitely have to go back out there. While we were there, we visited the Gateway Arch. Even though there was overcast and it was at night, the view was still pretty amazing.

We also visited The Magic House, which the kids loved. Lots of interesting things to look at and experience, including a Van de Graff static generator that made your hair stand out on end.

After that, we visited the city's Science Center. While we were there, they had an exhibit called Real Pirates that had several pieces of lost artifacts and treasure from a sunken pirate ship that sailed during the slave trades. We also got to experience their planetarium which was pretty neat.

Also while we were there, we visited a specialty grocery store called Trader Joe's which is popular there in the city. They carry a variety of unique foods as well as good Asian foods.

We had a great time, and we'll have to go back again.