Windows – How to share a printer on Windows 10 without homegroups

Install the printer on your Windows 7 machine, with the Windows 7 driver. Share the driver, and get the path name for it (i.e. \\MACHINENAME\PrinterName). On the XP computer, do the following:

1. Start the Add New Printer wizard
2. Select a Local Printer, do not auto detect
3. Choose a New Port->Type is Local Port
4. In the dialog, type \\MACHINENAME\PrinterName as it appeared above on the Windows 7 machine
5. On the driver selection page, either use Have Disk to get the driver, or select from the list
6. Continue with the wizard until finished

You can get the hostname (\\MACHINENAME) either from System Properties, or by running HOSTNAME at the Command Prompt. The Share Name is what the printer is shared as in the Printer Properties->Sharing tab

To explain the problem :

On Window 8.1, and presumably Windows 8, when using a Microsoft account to login to Windows, the default user-name when you make a network connection is MicrosoftAccount\<live_id_username>, instead of the login <computer_name>\<username> as in previous versions of Windows.

This MicrosoftAccount form is likely to cause a login failure on any server that is not using a Microsoft account, due to the strict way that Microsoft/Local accounts are implemented in Windows 8/8.1.

I have not been able to find a way of forcing Windows 8/8.1 to use the old format of computer-name\user-name, unless with one of the workarounds you have listed in your post. Probably this problem needs to be addressed by Microsoft itself.

I have tested and this is still true in Windows 10, so don't expect any improvement. Unfortunately, this is just the way that Microsoft/Local accounts were implemented.