Be Economical: Share Those Peripherals

Be Economical: Share Those Peripherals
Outside of the fact that there is only so much space on your desk or your
kitchen countertop, you simply don’t need a complete set of peripherals at
each device on your network. For instance, digital cameras are becoming
quite popular, and you can view pictures on your PC, on your TV, and even in
wireless picture frames around the house. But you probably only need one
color printer geared toward printing high-quality photos for someone to take
home (after admiring your wireless picture frames!).
The same is true about a lot of peripherals: business card scanners, backup
drives (such as Zip and Jaz drives), and even cameras. If you have one device
and it’s network enabled, anyone on the wireless network should be able to
access that for the task at hand.
Setting up a print server
The most common shared peripheral is a printer. Setting up a printer for
sharing is really easy, and using it is even easier.
You might have several printers in your house, and different devices might
have different printers — but they all can be shared. You might have the
color laser printer on your machine, a less expensive one (with less expensive
consumables like printer cartridges, too) for the kid’s computer, and a highquality
photo printer maybe near the TV set plugged into a USB port of a networkable
A/V device. Each of these can be used by a local device . . . if properly
set up.
Here are the steps that you need to take to share a printer:
1. Enable printer sharing within the operating system of the computer to
which the printer is attached.
2. Set up sharing for the installed printer.
We say installed printer because we assume that you’ve already installed
the printer locally on your computer or other device.
3. Remotely install the printer on every other computer on the network.
We describe remote installation in the aptly named section “Remotely
installing the printer on all network PCs.”
4. Access the printer from any PC on the network!
Throughout the rest of this section, we go through these four general steps in
much more detail.