Often we get questions on how to share your printer with others on your network. The easiest way is to have a printer with a network card, but what if you don’t? What if you do not want to upgrade to the latest model with a built-in network card? Well you have come to the right place.

How to Share your Printer if it Does not Have a Network Card

If your printer does not have a network card it will have either a USB port or a parallel port. With these two ports you will have two options to share your printer with others. The first way you will have your printer connected to your PC and the other you can use a print server. Let’s take a look at those two options:

Printer Connected to Your PC

If you have a home network and your printer is already connected to your PC on your network, you are really close to being able to share the printer. If you have major operating system on your computer like windows, mac OS or linux it will have an option to share the local printer you have. In windows sharing will be in the control panel, on the Mac OS you will find sharing in the system preferences. If you are running linux you more than likely know how and where to go to share your printer.

Once your printer is shared, go to the PC in which you would like to connect to. Make sure the correct printer driver is installed for the printer. And in the ports section you can add the connection to the shared printer on the other PC. You can then print a test page to make sure it is all setup correctly.

Printer Connected with a Print Server

If you don’t want to connect the printer to your PC directly, or you have a laptop and you want to move around you will want a print server. A print server replaces the PC in the scenario above, it acts as the sharing device to allow you to print. The print server comes in both a USB and parallel option, however the parallel option is very hard to find as a new purchase. Ebay or similar site could be used to find a parallel print server. Once you have the print server you connect it to your printer and then to your network. From there you can install the print driver and select the right port, which is now the printer server instead of a PC as above. Print server can be as inexpensive as $20 so can be a better price point than buying a brand new printer.

The Wrap Up

While we have only scratched on how to setup the sharing you can find tutorials on the internet. If you are uncomfortable in setting this up let us know. Discovernet offers you comprehensive Managed Print Services to help your business get back on track. Good luck and happy printing on your new shared printer.