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Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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192<br />

Part IV: Using a <strong>Wireless</strong> Network<br />

The same is true about many peripherals: business card scanners, backup<br />

drives (such as USB hard drives and NAS — network attached storage —<br />

boxes), and even cameras. If you have one device and it’s network enabled,<br />

anyone on the wireless network should be able to access that for the task at<br />

hand.<br />

Setting up a print server<br />

The most common shared peripheral is a printer. Setting up a printer for<br />

sharing is easy, and using it is even easier.<br />

You may have several printers in your house, and different devices may have<br />

different printers — but they all can be shared. You may have the color laser<br />

printer on your machine, a less expensive one (with less expensive consumables<br />

such as printer cartridges, too) for the kid’s computer, and a highquality<br />

photo printer maybe near the TV set plugged into a USB port <strong>of</strong> a<br />

networkable A/V device. Each <strong>of</strong> these can be used by a local device — if it’s<br />

properly set up.<br />

Here are the steps you need to take to share a printer:<br />

1. Enable printer sharing in the operating system <strong>of</strong> the computer to which<br />

the printer is attached.<br />

2. Set up sharing for the installed printer. We say installed printer because<br />

we assume that you’ve already installed the printer locally on your computer<br />

or other device.<br />

3. Remotely install the printer on every other computer on the network.<br />

We describe remote installation in the aptly named section “Remotely<br />

installing the printer on all network PCs,” later in this chapter.<br />

4. Access the printer from any PC on the network!<br />

Throughout the rest <strong>of</strong> this section, we go through these four general steps in<br />

much more detail.<br />

Sharing your printer in Windows XP<br />

Windows Vista and Windows XP are more sophisticated than previous<br />

Windows operating systems and subsequently have a server type <strong>of</strong> print<br />

sharing. In other words, they <strong>of</strong>fer all the features <strong>of</strong> a big network with<br />

servers on your local machine. These features include the ability to assign<br />

users to manage the print queue remotely, embed printer s<strong>of</strong>tware for easier<br />

installation, and manage when the printer is available based on a schedule<br />

you define.

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