One thing I’m often asked to sort out is shared printing. It seems a lot of people have a printer attached to their shiny new Mac, but still have an old Windows PC elsewhere in the house that needs to print too. Both Mac and PC are on the same wifi network, they’ve looked in the Sharing panel in System Preferences on the Mac and made sure Printer Sharing is turned on, but mysteriously the PC cannot detect, let alone use the Mac’s printer.
Sorting this out is easy once you remember that in lots of ways Macs and PCs really don’t talk the same language, and one of the Mac languages that PCs don’t understand is the network sharing language called ‘Bonjour’. The solution is simple: just download and install Bonjour for Windows from here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL999
It’s like an instant Linguaphone course for Windows! In two minutes your PC will understand the messages your Mac is shouting over the wifi, advertising that it has a printer available to use. As long as you have the correct drivers installed on the PC, you can simply select and install the Mac’s printer and away you go.
Another good thing is that since Apple first launched Bonjour in 2002, every major maker of network printers has adopted it. This means that if you have a new printer anywhere on your network these days, chances are you can just turn it on and your Bonjour-enabled PCs and Macs will be able to connect to it with (in theory anyway) no configuration.
There are caveats: Some people find that using Bonjour to share other things – notably your iTunes library – is nothing but a headache, but for easy networked printing as Apple intended, it’s as straightforward as can be.
