A few days ago I posted about the lack of printing compatibility as advertised by Apple between OS X & Windows. This has not changed. I have however gotten printing working now between the Mac and Windows. I did this in a rather convoluted way, but it works… The solution was to use LPD Unix Printing. This has to be installed as a Windows Component in Vista, and then manually configured in OS X. I found that OS X did not like the hostname of the Vista machine, and so I have now resorted to disabling DHCP and manually assigning IPs to the machines on the LAN here (about 6 machines) so that I can use the printer attached to Vista. Once it is set up in Vista, the computer’s IP entered in OS X as the lpd:// address, and the printers share name as the Queue name, it suddenly begins working.

While it is not as easy or fast as I would have liked, it is an acceptable compromise. That said I still feel Apple should update their website, or at least include something easy to find in the Support section of their website with detailed instructions on how to do this. I only figured it out having visited about ten 3rd party sites, and using some good old-fashioned trial and error…