Jill Cataldo

If your printer does not have Wifi support (might be hard a little complicated to set up), you should attach the printer to the desktop and set up a home network in Windows and share the printer on the network. I'm assuming your laptop connects wirelessly to your router, so you should be able to access the printer on the desktop if you run the network setup wizard (typically found in control panel) on both computers. Be sure to give the network the same name on both computers (i.e. Home, MS Home, Office, etc.). You do have to make sure that both computers are set up to share printers.

So after you set up a network on both computers and the computers are rebooted your laptop should be able to detect the printer attached to the desktop as a network printer. Go into control panel, add a printer and select that you want it to detect a network printer. It should detect it without any problem. Set it as the default printer. You can be anywhere in the house with the laptop and it should print as long as the desktop is plugged in and hooked up to the printer.

If you're unsuccessful with this the easiest solution is to install the drivers on both computers. Then, switch the usb cord when you want to print from the laptop.

Is your printer a wireless? If it is, you need to insert the printer disk into the laptop so it can find the printer. The printer should then be listed in the printer file of the laptop. If it is a wired printer, you need to us a USB cable to connect the laptop to the printer.