I know the mantra- if the company doesn’t supply the drivers, there is no way around it but I know there is but have forgotten how. How do I know- because I have the printer on my Win7 desktop and can print to it but as I said, I have forgotten how I did it (teaches me to write these things down in the future).
Here is the story- our home NW has the Brother MFC-8840D connected to a PC running XP that is ethernet connected to my wireless router. My XP machines (desktops and laptops) are able to get the drivers and use the printer without problems (I go to Network, click on the PC the MFC is connected to, the MFC shows up and I right click and then click on connect and drivers are downloaded to the laptop or desktop running XP and I can print to the MFC).
In Win7, since there are no Win7 drivers for this printer (Brother has not made them and will not), when I try to connect to the MFC, I get the message that no drivers are found, even after searching Win update. So, I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to connect to the printer since it is my wife’s primary printer for her work and she needs access to use it on her new Win7 Pro laptop.
I have tried the Vista drivers BUT there is no way to connect over the network wirelessly- I might be able to connect via USB or parallel but that is not what we want- we need to connect wirelessly so she can print from her Win7 laptop, like she can from her XP laptop.
Any ideas are welcome. One I have thought about is to install the XP virtual machine on her Win7 laptop and then using the XP mode install the drivers but don’t know if those drivers will work in Win7 mode without the XP virtual machine running, or will she have to be running the programs in XP mode, which requires installing all the programs again- not going to happen.
Thanks for any help.
steve
