It's Time To Set Your Printer Free
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday March 5, 2007
Ten years ago, the body corporate threw a fit when I strung a thin, barely visible cable between two upstairs rooms in our Sydney townhouse. We had a good cordless phone system with two handsets. The wires, however, linked a PC in the home office (well, spare bedroom) to the internet via the nearest telephone jack in the master bedroom.
If I had to make the same connection today, there might be less fuss, thanks to Wi-Fi. Wireless networking makes distributing computers around the average house or office much easier. It eliminates problems such as tripping over cables or offending fussy neighbours with the sight of them. But that's only half the story. Wireless means you have complete flexibility to move around, logging onto the net from anywhere you choose.And there's a lot more to wireless networking than internet access. In my current house, there are four PCs sharing a single ADSL line. But, just as importantly, they also share a photo printer, a laser printer and an external hard drive. This works well up to a point, but the shared devices are directly connected to the two desktop machines in our downstairs rumpus room. If someone is using one of the laptops in a bedroom, living room or on the deck, the user needs to walk downstairs and boot-up the relevant computer before they can print or back-up.This is where a print server comes in handy. This lets you share a printer across the network without connecting it directly to a PC, saving you time and energy. For example, Linksys has a $180 Wireless-G Print Server that allows you to print documents directly from a wireless computer.The Wireless-G is fast. It makes use of the high-speed 802.11g wireless technology and USB 2.0. So your data will hit the printer at lightning speed, not that speed really matters for remote wireless printing. It uses a web interface for changing the settings, which makes it relatively easy to control your printing. And it's tiny - about the size of a cigarette packet and small enough to mount on the side of your printer.It has only a USB port, so you can't connect an older 25-pin parallel port printer. However, another model in the Linksys range has this capability. The other downside is you can connect only one printer per unit - but otherwise it's a neat way around an annoying network roadblock.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
