The other day I had an issue with sharing a Brother Fax 2850 printer connected to Windows 7 with another Windows XP computer. Which I wanted to post for future reference.

The problem is fairly simple the driver from the Brother website here has a slightly different model name to the one detected by Windows 7.

The fix is easy just extract the driver then open the brpry4p.inf file with notepad (you may need to change the files properties so it is no longer “read-only” in order to save).

Scroll down to this line:

;; Model Name
BRFAX2900.MFC = "Brother FAX-2900"
BRFAX3800.MFC = "Brother FAX-3800"
BRFAX2850.MFC = "Brother FAX-2850"

Should be changed to the name Windows XP has listed:

;; Model Name
BRFAX2900.MFC = "Brother FAX-2900"
BRFAX3800.MFC = "Brother FAX-3800"
BRFAX2850.MFC = "Brother FAX-2850 USB"

After that change Windows XP should correctly detect the driver.