Sharing a printer over a WLAN with OSX and XP Part 2

A few entries back I described how a PC laptop running Windows XP was able to access a printer on a wireless LAN. The printer was connected to the WLAN via an Apple Airport Express station. Anyway, the IP address of the Apple Airport Express station would change depending on what we had switched on and off and this was a bugger because I had to reconfigure the relevant TCP-IP port settings on the PC laptop.

I thought there must be another way and I considered making the IP address of the Apple Airport Express station static. A colleague suggested distributing the IP addresses from the modem/router and not from the Airport Extreme Base station.

But, in the end, a wise friend, David, suggested I download Rendezvous for Windows Technology Preview 3. I did and it is sensational!

I downloaded the file on to the PC laptop, installed the software, restarted the machine and then launched the Rendezvous Printer Wizard. In a couple of clicks the printer was located and made the default printer. Brilliant!

Compared to the twenty three steps required to achieve the same thing via Windoze XP what can I say? Thanks David! Thanks Apple! Thanks ZeroConf Working Group!