How to share HP deskjet 3650 printer with a Dell laptop

We now have a Dell laptop computer in addition to the HP Pavilion we already had. My wife will be using the laptop. She wanted to be able to print from the laptop to the hp deskjet 3650 using the wireless router.

The laptop is connected to the Internet through a D-Link wireless router which works great. The D-Link included Network Magic which set up the home network. It also set up the printer as a shared device.

So it would seem straightforward to add the HP printer to the Dell and get printing remotely. Well it almost worked. The wizard came up and was able to find the shared printer off the HP PC. However after the dialog about downloading drivers off the HP, there was an error message that it didn't have the right driver version.

Uh Oh. I brought up the printer properties. It had an additional drivers section. That looked promising. But when I clicked to add new drivers it prompted me for a drive letter. There's no CD as all the software on the HP was pre-installed.

I thought to get the drivers from HP. So from hp.com I was able to easily click through a couple of screens to find the download for deskjet 3650 drivers. First I thought to put it on the HP. Then I decided to leave the HP unchanged as it has always worked fine so I didn't want to risk changing it. So I downloaded the drivers to the Dell instead.

When I installed them on the Dell the dialogs came up and then one said to plug in the printer. I just clicked Cancel, hoping it would work. But clicking Cancel aborts the driver install. So I ran the wizard again. This time when it said to plug the printer into the USB port I moved the laptop next to the PC. Then I unplugged the printer from the PC USB port and into the Dell USB port. Then happily the driver install completed and I was able to print a test page from the Dell onto the HP printer.

The last step was to plug the printer back into the PC USB port. Then I went back to the add printer wizard on the Dell. It found the shared printer as usual. This time it was able to add it successfully as it now had all the drivers from my earlier trickery. Then I set the shared printer as the default and deleted the physical printer definition that the driver installed. And that was that.