I really don’t like system administration.

I ran into an odd issue today with Windows Printer Sharing. My parents have a desktop with a USB-connected printer, as well as a laptop. I could connect the laptop to the shared printer just fine and print to it. However, whenever I would restart the laptop, I would get “The RPC server is unavailable” or “Access is denied” when trying to print again. After a lot of searching and checking the typical firewall and services settings, I discovered that the computers were simply in different workgroups. Once I changed the workgroup on the laptop to match the desktop, things worked perfectly.

Thought I’d post this in case anyone else on the Interweb has the same issue.