My wife just bought a Dell laptop with Windows Vista...the Desktop is Windows XP with a printer connected directly to it, and the printer was configured to be "shared". Tried to get the printer working from the laptop...click "add a printer", then "Is this a local or network printer?". Well, it's on the network, it sure doesn't seem local, but the network discovery thing doesn't find it, and you get "Access Denied" when trying to connect to it. Google, google, and low and behold, it's really a "local" printer, though you do give it the "\\systemname\printername" path in one of the entry fields.
Very intuitive. Also, the salesman who was trying to sell us another printer when buying the laptop was telling us "the old printer probably won't work...there probably no printer driver for Vista...". BS.
Of course, my wife needed something printed out right now because she was going out right now, and another option was to export the Word document to PDF, and email it to ourselves and print it out at the other computer. But Word didn't natively export to PDF, you had to install a Microsoft Plug-in for that, and you needed the "validation code" that came with word to install it, and we didn't have that handy. Eventually, I did also install PDFCreator, but that was around the same time I found out about the "Local Printer" thing.
What would we do without the internet? Spend useless hours on hold with Technical Support probably.
