Tag: imac

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Sharing a Printer

I have been trying to share a printer on my iMac with a Sony VAIO UX1XN running Windows Vista Business Edition (in the main to write a guide for my website).

I was quite impressed by using the Network and Sharing Center (when trying out file sharing which incidently works fine) that Vista recognised the printers attached t0 my iMac.

Windows Vista screenshot

However printing to the printer results in the print job just disappearing…

I have already configured the printer (it’s a wireless Canon MP600R) so the Vista PC can print direct to the printer, so printing is not an issue. This is much more a theoretical exercise to see if the UX1XN running Windows Vista can print to a shared printer on a Mac.

Initially I thought it might be because I hadn’t actually shared the printer on the Mac, but even doing that didn’t work.

I am not 100% sure of the reasons behind the lack of printing, but I suspect that because it is a wireless printer may be part of the problem.

Next thing to try is a printer connected to the Mac via USB and share that, I am expecting that to work.

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802.11n

I was playing around with my new 802.11n Airport Extreme base station seeing how I could maximise the performance of the wireless network.

I switched to a pure 5Ghz 802.11n network and then using Chicken of the VNC on my work MacBook Pro made a connection to my iMac and set EyeTV going. I was quite impressed with the screen refresh, however it wasn’t good enough (even at 300Mbs) to watch remotely.

I also undertook some file transfers and was very impressed with the speed.

I had to switch back to b/g compatible mode which reduced the 802.11n speed down to 130Mbs, but as I have a fair few legacy devices I need the b/g compatability. I will at some point add an Airport Express or my older 802.11g Airport Extreme to one of the LAN ports of the newer base station to enable me to have a dual wireless network, one a pure 802.11n network and a b/g network.

The only problems I had were when I switched back to b/g compatible mode, I forgot to reset the security back to WPA/WPA2 mode which meant that my HP TC1100 Tablet failed to connect back onto the network. I had to reset the wireless security and then reboot the TC1100 before it would connect correctly to the wireless network. Other devices worked fine, butI suspect that was because theTC1100 hardware doesn’t support
WPA2.

I also had to delete and add back my wireless Canon MP600R wireless printer.

I am impressed with the new 802.11n Airport Extreme and I haven’t even started to utilise the full functionality of the device.

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Frozen Upgraded Parallels

I started Parallels on my iMac and there was a new update, which (as I thought I have the time) decided to download and install.

Well it took ages to download the disk image and when it finally did get downloaded, I am guessing it did not mount correctly as first Parallels froze and then the whole Mac.

Generally when an application fails to behave properly on a Mac, you can shut it down even force it to quit, but everything else continues to work. Today with Parallels that wasn’t what happened.

With the whole Mac not working, I gave it five minutes and then holding down the power button forced the iMac to shut down.

I restarted the Mac and everything seemed to be okay.

I mounted the Parallels disk image and ran the upgrade installer, which worked fine, and then updated my virtual XP machine which also went fine.

Not sure what went wrong, but XP on Parallels is now working fine.