1. Sharing the Printers
2. How to Access the Shared Printer
Having several computers around the house but only one printer is not uncommon. In fact, it's the source of marital strife in some computers-oriented households: Who gets to have the printer hooked up to his or her computer?
With a network, the answer's easy: everybody. Simply connect the printer to the network, and everybody can send files to it without having to get up.
To put a printer on the network, follow these simple steps:
1. Double-click on the My Computer icon of the computer currently connected to the printer.
The 'My Computer' window appears.
2. Double-click on the Printers folder.
The 'Printers' window pops onto the screen.
3. Right-click on the icon of the printer you'd like to share and choose Sharing from the pop-up menu.
The printer's Properties window appears, showing its Sharing page.
4. Click on the Shared As button and then click on the OK button to finish.
That's pretty much it -- simplicity itself. You can get a little more elaborate if you want. For example, you can type a password into the Password box in Step 4 if you want to restrict printer access to password-knowing networkers only.
TIPS:
1. You can also type a name for your printer in Step 4, like Fred, or PaperJam. Whatever you type in the Share Name box is the name that appears as the printer's name to the other networked users on their computers. If you don't type anything, Windows 98 simply uses that first word in the printer's icon name.
2. Anything you type into the optional Comments box of Step 4 also shows up on the network as an additional description.
How to Access the Shared Printer
Accessing a networked printer is a mite more complicated than accessing shared hard drives or folders, but it's not too much of a pain. When accessing a hard drive or a folder, you can get in immediately because you've already done the setup work.
But when you want to access a printer, you need to jump through a few hoops -- even though you've made the printer available as a shared resource, as described above in this article.
The next few steps show you how to setup Computer A so that it can use a printer that's been connected to computer B.
TIP: Highly paid computer gurus (administrators) refer to the computer that's connected to the printer as the Print Server. The other computers are called Print Clients. Similarly, whenever you grab a file from a computer, the computer that's grabbing is the client; the computer that's dishing out the files is the server.
