Basic Printer Sharing—— 10 Points to the Best Answer!?
1. I have a linksys wireless router.
2. The router connects my two desktops with a standard ethernet cable. It also connects my laptop wirelessly.
3. One of my printers has a usb cable, the other has a standard parallel printer cable. My router, on the other hand, does not have ports for usb or parallel printer cables.
None of my printers are wireless.
How can I set up a network on my computers so that I can share printers?
Thank you so much to the people that answer! Please be as detailed as possible!
Also, is there anyway I can set up a network without using a print server and still be able to access a printer from another desktop?
Accessing the printer from my laptop isn’t all that important.
Simple all you need to do is get a print server. These run anywhere from $19 and up. I use 3 of these: D-Link Express EtherNetwork DP-301U Print Server.
1 USB 1.1/2.0 port
1 10/100 LAN port
Very easy to setup the printer to use with this. And the trick is to have one PC act has the host for the drivers and software. Best way to do it is to copy the CD to a hard drive folder. Let’s give it a name: HP4100. Now you would share out this folder HP4100.
Each Print Server has it’s own name. Let’s call it PRTS1 IP address 192.168.1.12 Printer Name HP4100.
Now using the print server you can setup the printer anywhere in the house you want. Just make sure you have enough LAN cable to reach it. If all your 4 ports on your router are filled up you can buy 5-port or 8-port switch to extend the features of your router.
Setup Example:
Router—-external 8-port switch —pc1 —- pc 2 — print server
If you have wireless laptops they can connect via wireless to the printer server. Doesn’t really matter how they connect but they do.
Remember with a print server you don’t need to have a PC left on just leave the print server on. That’s it..
To access or to setup the printer on each PC all you have to do is this:
On my network places under xp if you have xp running. You would go under view work group computers. Look for PRTS1 double click on that. Then right click connect. You will be given a message but just click okay. Now select the printer make then click on browse for the driver which in this case is HP4100 HDD folder that you had shared out on another PC. In that folder there is an autorun.inf click on that. This will do the rest for you. Once that is done the printer connected to the print server will appear and be ready to use.
If you have more than one USB printer you can had as many print servers you need. These min print servers can work with all-in-one printers and laser printers.
1:20 scale Mini Cooper with onboard camera
router
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