Quite recently a few people have asked how to fix a problem which seems to occur without warning relating to sharing a printer via a networked PC / Laptop.  Many have found that after setting the properties to share a printer on a PC / Laptop (hard wired to a printer), when they try to connect to it from a seperate machine the following error message appears: “Windows cannot connect to the printer. Either the printer name was typed incorrectly, or the specified printer has lost its connection to the server.”

This is a common problem and an easy way to fix it is:

Note: This method will only work with Printers been shared via another computer – if your printer is a “network” printer – with its own ip address – then the procedure below will not work.

• Install the printer driver onto the machine you are getting the error on. (You may at some point need to use a USB lead to connect to the printer during this install process.)
• Once the driver is installed, click START > CONTROL PANEL > PRINTERS & FAXES.
• Right click on the printer you want to connect to over the network and select PROPERTIES from the list.
• Select the PORTS tab from the window which will appear
• Click on the ADD PORT button (Leave default setting of LOCAL PORT set)
• Click NEW PORT
• In the window which appears type in the location of the printer using the following syntax: \\192.168…\nameofprinter (as an example, if your printers name is  ‘netPrinter’  hard wired to a PC with the ip address of ‘192.168.1.2’ then you would type in the following \\192.168.1.2\netPrinter
• Click CLOSE and then close the Printer Properties window.
• Your computer should now be connected to printer over the network.

Hope this helps someone.