I was trying to install my networked color-laser printer on my daughter’s laptop this weekend. She is running Vista Ultimate, my printer is a Dell 3110cn Color Laser, and it is connected and shared via Windows 2003 R2 server.
My laptop connected to the printer fine as a network printer, but her computer kept throwing the following exception:
Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed (error 0×000003e3).
The resolution was the following:
- Install the drivers for the printer on the computer
- Start button > Printers > Add Printer
- Add a local printer
- Create a new port > local port
- Enter the name to the shared printer. If the name has spaces, rename the printer’s share name on the host/server.
- Choose the correct drivers that were installed (from step 1)
- If prompted, choose to use the existing driver
- Name the printer for the local machine
- The rest of the steps are self-explanatory
I hope this helps any who struggle with this annoyance.
