Using shared network printer

[Guest]

I have a wireless network at home. My desktop has an attached printer which is shared. I use the printer as the default on my laptop. Everything works great except when the desktop is off and I open Word on my laptop, Word quickly fails
I have worked around this by adding a printer to the laptop and printing to a file. If I name it as default, Word will run okay
Anyone have a solution for this

Thanks, Geral

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Gerald

Your workaround is *the* solution.

Word must have a printer driver loaded in order to operate. It makes
no difference whether you intend to print or not -- Word calls into
the driver to do screen layout. On startup, it tries to load the
driver for the default printer. If that driver resides only on an
unavailable drive (your desktop), Word doesn't have any way to
continue.

The solution is to have copies of the printer driver on both machines,
so the laptop always has access to it.