Wireless USB Print Servers

PorkChopSandwiches

Does anyone have any experience with a particular wireless usb print server that has been positive? I'm really tired of lugging my laptop all the way into the room where my printer is. I'm that lazy.

Seriously though, I want to buy one and I'd rather not spend huge amounts of cash on it.

bsjezz

I plug my USB printer right into an ASUS WL-500g (which has an intergrated print server) and it serves my laptop perfectly. It was a pain in the arse to set up, though - lots of digging through forums for tutorials on the things, and mucking around with the printer drivers. If you think you'll be cool with getting through all that, it's been a good solution for me.

HAKdragon

I have a Motorola WPS870G. Supports Wiress and Wired connections. It has two ports, one for USB, the other Parallel. The only problem I've had with it remembering to set which port I'm using when I install a printer on a computer on the network, though they tell you how to do this in the manual and it's not difficult at all.

exoplasm

You can save yourself some time and money if your printer is already hooked up to another computer.

Go to the printers folder in Control Panel, and right-click the printer and choose "Sharing..." then choose "Share this printer" and give it a short name if you like.

Next you will need to know the computer's name or ip address (start -> run -> cmd -> ipconfig) and then on your laptop go to start -> run and type in "\\192.168.1.x\" or "\\computername\" although the IP address will be faster because Windows is not good about DNS on local machines. Optionally you can add the shared printer name to the end of that, if it has spaces make sure to include quotes around the whole command.

Once you are there (if you can't get there, you need to change some security settings on the host computer) just right-click the printer and choose Connect. Set it as your default on your laptop and you're good to go.

Note that this does not work 100% with all printers, as some brands (brother and lexmark seem to be big on this) will not play nice with transferring drivers around. HP printers almost always work flawlessly with this setup.