Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Sharing Your PC's Printer

Sharing files is all well and good, but what about that $1,000 color laser printer that's stuck in the basement office, chained to the computer down there? Sharing printers on your home network is a lot like sharing files. With file sharing, you made the file or folder available on the network by sharing it. Other people can then access those files by connecting to them over the network. Printer sharing works in the exact same way, but there is one additional step you have to take, which is to install the wee bit o' software that makes the printer work.

If you have printers connected to any of your computers, you probably remember having to install drivers—the tiny utility programs that give Windows the ability to communicate with your add-on hardware like printers, scanners, CD burners, and so on. Without the right driver, your printer won't work, because Windows won't know how to deal with it. Even when the printer is connected to someone else's computer, you still need to install drivers on your computer to use that printer over there on the other side of the network.

Note

If you share a printer that's attached to a particular PC, you have to leave that PC on for others on the network to use it. Your other options include buying a network-ready printer, which comes with an Ethernet jack that lets you connect the printer directly to your router (Section 1.1). Or you can buy a router with a built-in print server, which is a device that lets you plug a regular ...