by Jade Stephen

Created on: May 03, 2008

Consider the following scene. It is Sunday night, and you are on your PC finishing documents for work. Your teenage child is working on their homework on their notebook. You finally finish and go for the printer, but your child has already taken it across the room and hooked it to his computer. Now you have to set it back up,0 turn it back on and then attempt to make it work. Sound like a pain to you? Luckily, there is an easy and cheap solution.

In a Windows environment there are several ways to connect multiple PCs to one printer. Depending on how much you reply on your printer a wide range of solutions available. The easiest and cheapest method of connecting your printer to your network is simply to set the printer as shared on your network.

This entails installing a printer on one of the computers. Navigate through the start button to printers, then right click on the printer's icon in the folder and open its properties. Open the sharing tab and choose the "share this printer" radio button. From this point just name your computer and it will be available to all other systems on your network. Keep in mind that if you have computers that do not have the same O/S as the host PC, you must install the correct drivers on the host. Also, the host computer must be on for other systems to use it.

The next option is user friendly, but expensive. Usually, expensive higher modeled printers have ethernet ports built into them to allow a customer to hook the printer to a router and make it available to the network directly. Once this is done all computers on the network will be able to install their own drivers for the printer.

The last real option for Windows based environments is simply to run a sever for your external devices. To do this simply purchase another system and have it host all your devices and share them with the network. Then your computers that are set up for every day use can easily access any of the printers without any of the inconvience. With the proper setup and a little bit of effort, you will never have to share again.

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