Make A Printer Wireless

Make A Printer Wireless

So you have yourself a wireless network and a printer. The printer is
not wireless. The challenge is that you would like to print over the
wireless network from any computer connected to your network either
wired or wireless. How do do it?

The answer is quite simple and the logic behind it is quite sound. No
matter what the make or model the printer is, you can simply send print
jobs to it through the wireless network by connecting it to a computer
that is always on and share the printer from that machine.

I will be using good old Windows XP as the client and print server to
show you how it works. It will be a little more complicated on Windows 7
or Vista but if you have your share permissions down, it should be
easy.

First things first. Make sure that you have the same username and
password set up on the machine you want to use as your print server and
the machine you are going to print from. This is required so that you
can communicate with the other machine. Once you have the machines’
usernames and passwords synced up, you can turn to the machine with the
printer attached to it.

From this machine (which we will call the print server), we will need
to set up the printer on it (if it is not already completed). Test that
you can print and the output is what you expected. Then we will need to
go to Printers and Faxes in the control panel.

You need to right click on the printer that you want to share and choose
properties like so:

When you get to the properties page for the printer, you will want to
click on the tab that says Sharing. Chances are sharing will be turned
off like it is in the screenshot below. Simply click on the share this
printer button. That will enable the box to type in the printer’s name.
It will be grayed out until you click the radio button to share it.

 

You will want to name the printer something memorable. I called mine
HP1100 (this was the default the machine offered me)

Now depending on what other operating systems that may connect to the
print server, you might want to click the Additional drivers button to
load up drivers for other operating systems besides Windows XP.

 

That will take you to this screen:

Simply check off the system types you want to use and point it to the
correct drivers. You may have to find the CD that came with the printer
or go download them from the manufacture’s site.


Now, when you are done walk on over to the computer you want to print
from wireless. Hit Start – run and then type \\ and your IP address
or host name. Mine is 192.168.1.29 so I typed \\192.168.1.29

If you see this dialogue then you do not have the same password and
username on both machines.

Hit Control+Alt+Delete on each machine and verify that the username is
the same. When you are done, run the command again and you should now
see this:

Double click on the printers folder, then on the actual printer. It will
install the drivers and you will be good to go and able to print from
any application as long as the print server is on.