Xy on Vista: Net Use Printing

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Ed Mendelson's page said this was no longer supported, but my
experiments seem to indicate Not quite. I don't have an HP USB
printer here, but we have 2 over at the paper, so I lugged my
laptop over and tried it.
Having installed the printer (a Deskjet 842C) in Windows, I then
made it shared (with a no spaces share name), opened a cmd
prompt, and commanded
net use lpt1 \\ThisPC\HPDJ842C

I didn't bother with the Persistent wrinkle yet. CMD reported
Command completed successfully
and when I then commanded
copy d:\path\filename.ext lpt1
out popped a printout.
I then opened Xy. edited the pick printer table in settings.dfl
to include an old Xy HP .prn driver that is known to work with
this prnter, and tried to print a file. Xy reported printer error.
Now, one important caveat: I had forgotten to actually set up a
network connection. There was no CAT5 cable plugged into the
laptop's RJ45 port. Under XP, you couldn't do Net Use unless you
had a cable, and a connection to a powered hub or switch. Vista
doesn't seem to require that, but maybe Xy does.
IN any event. when I printf'd the file, then shelled to cmd and
issued the copy lpt command, the file printed. So anyone using
Vista and having an HP USB printer could always do that. Easy
enough to automate with XPL.

Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx