After finally giving up trying to get my printer to work in Parallels, it decided to suddenly work. Yea, hurrah, break out the bubbly. Oops, not so fast. Now it won't work in Mac. Do I have to uninstall it from Parallels? I don't understand why it suddenly decided it would cooperate and install in Parallels and now won't work in Mac. This sucks. Any advice?
I believe that if its a USB printer, then only one OS can have access to it at one time. So its either OS X or Parallels, but not both.
That seems to be the case. After i closed parallels, the printer worked fine with the mac. Sure would help to have some documentation, or a way of switching back and forth without having to close parallels.
I'm running Parallels on a MacBook Pro w/2g ram. Guest os installations include Win XP, Fedora Core 6, and Solaris. The last two are there for giggles. I have an HP Photosmart 7550 and an HP Laserjet 5m. The 5m is a network connection and works great. The 7550 was installed in OS X using the CUPS installer that is included in OS X. Access it at http://127.0.0.1:631. I used the nearest definition I could for the printer as there are no specific drivers for it. Regardless, it works fine in OS X. To have XP see it I downloaded Bonjour for Windows from Apple.com. I also downloaded drivers for the 7550 from HP. Win XP sees the printer just fine now and it works great. In Parallels I configured it to not automatically attach USB devices. Had I not then Windows would have grabbed the printer, preventing OS X and Bonjour from seeing it. I also have an HP Scanjet scanner that has no OS X support. No matter, it works great in XP. For this I have to open the Parallels menu and under the USB menu I select the scanner. XP sees it as a new piece of hardware and attaches to it immediately. The HP Scanner software runs it exactly as if it were native. I have a Keyscan USB to RS232 adapter and it also works fine in both Windows XP and OS X. Same menu requirements apply. There's a floppy disk over USB attached and it too works in OS X and XP. A 2g thumb drive is visible to OS X and XP, again, either/or. Works great. My wife has a Mac Mini and it remote mounts to the shared printer. She can run the scanner remotely with VNC. We've also installed a PDF printer driver for XP for creating PDF files from any Win app. She's got QuickBooks Pro running in XP on her mini, and the OS X version of MS Office. I have a very nice CAD package installed in XP on my laptop - Rhino from McNeel in Seattle. I have a two-button trackball mouse attached and it's fantastic. Done right and with an understanding of how to avoid USB collisions this is all quite nice. I'm running Parallels version 1970. My only complaint is the 1970 install lost the registration number and I have to re-type it in. This is especially annoying because I bought two licenses long ago during the early beta program but they've sent me only one, and they've not responded to email requests for the second key. Added Nov. 8, 2006: Keys showed up in an email this am! I'm still Parallels' happiest customer.
