Printing Wirelessly on a PC Network

Question

I am completely new to the PC Networking..
I have a Canon MF6550 and HP Laserjet 1600, both hooked up to the PC and on a network where our second PC can print wirelessly.
We now have a MacBook and would like to also print wirelessly.
I have read many many posts in the Apple Discussions and on the internet in general.. after a bunch of days of trying everything, I'm at a loss. I can't get it to work so far.
Please help.
I tried this --> "All right only took me ten hours to find an answer to this yesterday for myself. I have the same setup different printer. First of all make sure you have the Mac on the same windows workgroup. You can find the xp's workgroup by right clicking my computer/properties/computer name tab. Once you have that and the computer's name not the computer description the computer name written down exactly then go to control panel/printers and other hardware/view installed printers. Right mouse click on the printer you are using click properties/then the share tab/select to share the printer and pick a name for it to be called over the network, I would stick to a single word and no funny symbols etc. Write this down exactly. go to your mac system preferences/network/advanced tab bottom right/WINS and then pick out a name that the other computers will see if you ever file share etc. in the top box and put in the workgroup name in the bottom box. Click OK, apply all that. Then go to system preferences/print and fax/click the plus sign to add a printer. Press the control key while clicking on more printers and choose customize toolbar. Drag the advance gear looking icon to the top bar. Now after you clicked done on the previous window click the advanced tab and under Type: select Windows. In the URL: section it should have already put smb:// You just need to fill in the blanks it should say smb://computer's name/printer's name. Mine reads smb://pornstorage/epsonr380. Select a driver to use below, unfortunately mine was pre - installed there and yours does not appear to be so maybe try one closest to your model or do as the other person said and search that website for one to use. Hopefully that should work. Good luck, and I'm not joking when I said it took me ten hours to figure this out. I'm brand new, first day with a mac so probably other ways to do this but this worked for me."
I've followed these directions before.. yet, they don't seem to work for me.
In the WINS tab, do I put in the "computer name" (which it says is "Computer Name: karens." not the Computer Name Description) for the "NetBIOS Name", or do I put in the Workgroup, which it says is "Workgroup: WORKGROUP." How would I do that?
And then when I try to add either one of the printers (neither one of the drivers show up). Its funny because when I have the printer MF6550 hooked up via USB the mac will find the driver automatically, yet when I try to add it wirelessly, it doesn't find anything and there isn't a driver that at all looks like that model listed.
So many darn bells and whistles. I want to curse the PC, but I can't, I have to work with it. Any help is appreciated.
We are using a Dell Windows XP and Mac 10.5.6. And we had someone setup the network for wireless printing for the PCs a while back, I have no idea how they did it.

Answer 1

The MF6550 uses Canon proprietary UFR2 page description language, which is also used on the larger office copier/mfd's which we have in our office. When the copier is connected directly to the network, you have to add the printer via More Printers > Canon IP (UFR2). Here you can enter the IP address of the printer and a queue name of LP. No option exists to manually browse for the printer model, the software queries the printer based on the IP address and selects the appropriate model. The software will then create the printer queue based on the LPD protocol.
Since you have it shared by a PC and want to use SMB, then you will not get the option to browse for the printer due to limitations of the driver software.
Therefore you need to look at using the LPD protocol, which will work with the driver software, to connect to the printer share on Windows.
The first thing you need to do is enable support for the LPD protocol for shared printers on Windows. Open Control Panel and click 'Add or Remove Programs'. Then click 'Add/Remove Windows Components' located in the left pane. The 'Windows Component Wizard' will appear. Scroll through the list and enable (tick) 'Other Network File and Print Services'. This should enable 'Print Services for UNIX'. You can click the Details button to confirm this is so. Now click the OK button at the bottom of the 'Windows Component Wizard' and wait as the new service is added. I can't remember if you will be prompted for your Windows CD, so have it handy just in case. You may also have to restart the PC in order for the service to start, so do this anyway.
Now that you have the UNIX service running on the PC, you can add the printer queue again, this time using the More Printers > Canon IP (UFR2). For the IP address field, enter the IP address of the Windows PC sharing the MF6550, and for the queue name, enter the share name for the MF6550 set in the Windows computer. With a bit of luck the MF6550 model should be found by the software and the queue should be created. If this does happen, then try a print from the Mac. If it doesn't work, then please reply.
PaHu