Setting up the printer on the local network. How to make a printer network

Updated - 2017-02-16

How do I set up printer sharing? While you do not know what a local area network is, it seems that you don’t really feel the inconvenience of working without it. But when you already know its advantages, you want to use them for full program. And it is right!

It is stupid to rush with a USB flash drive from computer to computer, which are a couple of meters apart. And in order to go on the Internet to wait in line, while other households play enough there. Try, stick to them during the game.

So they hiss that you forget why you needed the Internet. Here you will not regret a couple of hundred rubles, if only to have your personal access to the vast World wide web, and go about their business without disturbing anyone.

We have already set up, created a network common to all computers, now it's time to set up a shared printer.

How to set up printer sharing

On the computer to which the printer is connected, open a window Printers and Faxes (Start - Settings - Printers and Faxes) . A window will open Printers and Faxes . Right-click on the icon of the connected printer. In the dropdown menu select General access… .

In the newly opened window on the tab Access set the switch to the inscription Sharing this printer . Do not touch anything else. Click on the button To apply and OK .

Your printer icon will now look like this. A small shared picture will appear on it.

• We pass to another computer to which you need to connect the printer over the network.
• Open the folder network (or icon network on the desktop or through Start - Settings - Control Panel - Network Connections - Network Neighborhood - Display workgroup computers.

• In the next window, select the computer icon on which the printer is installed and open it with a double click.
• In the new window, click the printer icon again.

There will be such an entry in which you will be asked whether to install the necessary drivers. Feel free to press the button Yes .

This window will eventually appear.

In many offices, they set up a local network in order to exchange data, use common technical means. For medium and small office, it is easier to install one powerful printer, instead of several small ones. It is necessary to connect it in such a way that it can be accessed from all computers of the institution. To turn into a regular network printer, you need to correctly change some parameters of the devices.

There are printing devices that connect directly to the router, bypassing the computer, but they are expensive. The easiest and cheapest way is to make a regular printer public. It connects to one of the office computers standard way - through LPT or USB port, then it is made publicly available on the network. This method network use The printer has limitations in its capabilities. The computer or laptop to which the shared printer is physically connected must have the maximum network time active. Drivers and software install on it from a disk always attached to the printer, or search and download on the Internet on the manufacturer’s website. Check the system is working. Make the printer public. To configure, open “Devices and Printers” (or “Printers and Faxes”) in the control panel. Find the installed printer, open its “Properties” by right-clicking on the icon of your printer. In the Properties window, the desired tab is Access. Check the box next to "Share this printer". Leave the network name of the printer suggested by the system or specify your own. For example: “OKI_C510dn”. Under this name in local area network The printer will be recognized as a shared resource. Enter any name, but without spaces. All computers connected by a network have the same operating system installed as on a computer with a connected printer - click OK. The procedure is completed. In the case when there are computers on the local network with another operating systemset for them suitable drivers. In the Properties window, under the Drivers section of the Access tab, click the Additional Drivers button. A list of drivers opens, in which check the boxes against those that you may need for other Windows. Pay attention to the “Installed” column; if the word “No” appears there, you must install the driver disk from the printer manufacturer, or download the selected drivers from its official website. For example:, Canon, Epson, OKI. Now you can use the printer as a network share. On the remote computer go to the section "Devices and Printers" (or "Printers and Faxes"), call the "Add Printer Wizard". A window will open, in it, as a connection method, select "Network Printer", then "Next". It remains to correctly specify the path to the installed network printer. Observe the syntax: two signs “forward slash”, the name of the computer on the network, “slash”, the network name of the printer. For example: "\\\\ MyComp \\ OKI_C510dn". Press "Next". The printer installation process will end with the system prompting you to print a test page — do it.

The advantages of this connection network printer: there is no need to buy new equipment, it is standard for Windows, easy to execute, without additional software. Cons: a computer with a physically connected printer must work even before it is used, its slow operation during a remote printing session, a long wait time for a print, especially for color printing.

Hello.

I think the benefits of a configured printer on a LAN are obvious to everyone. A simple example:

If access to the printer is not configured, then you first need to drop the files on the PC to which the printer is connected (using a USB flash drive, disk, network, etc.) and only then print them (in fact, to print 1 file - you need to do ten unnecessary "actions);

If the network and printer are configured, then on any PC on the network in any of the editors, you can click one "Print" button and the file will be sent to the printer!

Conveniently? Conveniently! Here's how to configure the printer to work over the network in Windows 7, 8 and will be described in this article ...

STEP 1 - Configuring the computer to which the printer is connected (or how to "share" the printer for all PCs on the network).

To be able to use the printer with any PC on the network, you must correctly configure the computer to which it is connected.

To do this, go to the Windows control panel, in the section: Control Panel \\ Network and Internet \\ Network and Sharing Center.

In the window that opens, you need to open three tabs in turn (Fig. 2, 3, 4). In each of them, check the boxes next to the items: enable file and printer sharing, disable password protection.

Fig. 2. sharing settings - opened tab “private (current profile)”

Fig. 3. The opened tab "guest or public"

Fig. 4. the opened tab "all networks"

Here, select your printer, click on it with RMB (right mouse button) and select the “ Printer Properties". In the properties, go to the "Access" section and check the box next to " Sharing this printer"(See Fig. 5).

If access to this printer is open, then any user of your local network can print on it. The printer will not be available only in certain cases: if the PC is turned off, it is in sleep mode, etc.

Fig. 5. Sharing the printer for network sharing.

You also need to go to the “Security” tab, then select the “Everyone” user group and enable printing (see. Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Now printing on the printer is available to everyone!

STEP 2 - How to connect the printer over a network and print on it

Now you can proceed to configure computers that are on the same local network as the PC to which the printer is connected.

The first step is to launch a regular explorer. At the very bottom left, all PCs connected to your local network should be displayed (relevant for Windows 7, 8).

In general, click on the PC to which the printer is connected, and if in step 1 (see above) the PC was configured correctly, you will see the shared printer. Actually - right-click on it and in the pop-up context menu select the connection function. Usually, the connection takes no more than 30-60 seconds. (the drivers are automatically connected and configured).

Then select the connected printer, click on it with the right mouse button and enable the “ Use by default«.

Fig. 8. use the default printer over the network

Now, in whatever editor you are (Word, Notepad, and others), when you click the Print button, a network printer will be selected automatically and you will only need to confirm printing. Setup is complete!

If connecting printeran error appears on the network

For example, a common error when connecting a printer is the standard "Windows cannot connect to the printer .... "And some error code is issued (type 0x00000002) - see fig. 9.

In one article it is impossible to consider the whole variety of errors - but I will give one simple advice that often helps me get rid of such errors.

That's all. By the way, if the printer does not print, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with this article:

As always, thank you in advance for any addition to the article! Have a good work!

Recently, many customers and just acquaintances have encountered problems setting up network printing with windows computer 7 to a network printer located on a Windows XP machine. The fact is that in small offices mainly local printers are used, which are connected via USB to a working computer, which usually works under running windows XP, and all newly acquired machines (which already come with Windows 7), print to these printers over the network.

In the event that you try to configure such a print server on a PC running Windows 7, then there will be no problems connecting other clients. But, unfortunately, when trying to print to a network printer on XP with Windows 7, most likely there will be difficulties.

In this article I will try to describe the procedure for setting up printing to a network printer in XP from Windows 7.

1 ) Make sure that the printer on the XP machine is shared (the printer is shared). You can verify this by right-clicking and selecting Sharing(General access).

Activate the option Sharethis printer and set the name of the printer. The name of the network printer must be less than 8 characters long and not contain service characters.

2 ) Check that the network printer is visible from Windows 7. To do this, open the Control Panel and press the button NetworkandInternet.

At this point, you should see the name of the computer running Windows XP in the list of network devices. In our case, the name of the PC is Aseem.

Double-click on the computer name and you will see a list of XP printers that are shared. You can try adding this printer by right-clicking on it and selecting Connect (to plug).

In the event that everything goes well, in Windows 7 there will be a new network printer connected to XP. However, if you see the message “ Cannot connect to printer”, Follow these steps.

3) In the Start menu, select Devices and printers. In the top menu, press the button Adda printer (Add Printer).

4) Then select Adda localprinter (Add local printer). Yes, this is extremely logical, but do just that!

6) In the dialog box with the port name, you need to specify the UNC path to the network printer on XP. In our example, this is \\ Aseem \\HPXPwhere Aseem is the network name of the XP machine, and HPXP is the name of the network printer on it.

7) Next, you need to select a driver for this printer model (you can choose from the ones already installed, or add a new one using the Have Disk button). It is best to download the latest version of the driver for Windows 7 for this printer model from the manufacturer’s website.

That's all! Windows 7 will install the print driver and you can easily print to a network printer on Windows XP from Win 7. The procedure for setting up this bundle is simple, the main thing is to open shared access to a network printer on XP and download the latest print drivers for Windows 7!

In the event that you have any problems with network printing on Win XP from Windows 7, leave your comments here, and together we will try to find a solution.

2. Connection via an external print server of a third-party manufacturer

There are many manufacturers who offer various implementations of external print servers that allow connecting ordinary printers to the network. These print servers can be either the simplest “box”, in which, on the one hand, there is an RJ-45 connector for connecting a network cable, and on the other, a parallel port connector, or a connector for connecting a USB cable. Or it can be a more modern, combined solution, which is, for example, an access point to wireless networknetwork hub vPN client and a print server that connects to the printer via a USB port. But regardless of the physical implementation of the print server, the method of installing printers connected to it will be the same and I will describe this method below.

First of all, you need to install the print server itself. This is done in accordance with the instructions attached to it and using the software supplied by the print server. Usually this special program, which at a minimum should fulfill one important function for us: set the IP address and subnet mask in the print server, corresponding to the addressing accepted in your LAN (for example, address 192.168.2.112 and mask 255.255.255.0). After we set the IP address, we need to check its operability. To do this, at least ping it, and it is best to go to its internal website by entering the IP address set in our print server in address bar browser. After making sure that the print server is visible on the network, we proceed to install our printer.

In general, the installation is done in the same way as described above as "". Please note that despite the fact that in this case the printer will be networked, we select the option "Local printer connected to this computer", then activate the "Create a new port" item and select "Standard TCP / IP Port" in the list :

This is the most versatile and easiest option, working in most cases. However, manufacturers of print servers can offer alternative options for implementing an IP stack for printing, and these options can be automatically installed at the stage of installing a print server using the program attached to it. For example, the figure on the right shows that among the selection options there is an OKI LPR Port, which is added when the OKI print server is installed in the system. By clicking on the “Next” button we will be asked to enter the IP address and queue name for our network printer. Here it is necessary to enter exactly the address that we assigned to our print server at the stage of its installation. The queue name is usually any word convenient for you. However, in some cases it is necessary to use the queue names specified by the print server manufacturer in advance, without which the printer cannot work!
Most likely, after this, another window will appear informing that the type of network device is not recognized:

In this case, you can leave the Generic Network Card option, or search the option list, the best way appropriate to your print server. Most best option in this case, the name of your print server will be in the list (usually appears if the print server is installed from the disk attached to it). Slightly worse, but anyway, the choice of any print server of the same manufacturer that your print server did will become normally working. Further, the installation process does not differ from the alternative described above: you must select a printer driver (either from a list or from a disk) and the installation process will automatically end with a suggestion to print a test page. You can do this if your printer is already connected to the print server.

	Cannot remotely control a network printer. External print servers offer only the ability to determine the status of the printer - is it ready for use or is offline and set the parameters of the port through which it is connected. Current status printer (the cover is open, out of paper or consumables) are usually not available, as is the ability to make printer settings.
	An external power supply is required to power an external print server. This is not always a big problem, but as practice shows, people sometimes point out this reason as a lack of solution.
	To connect printers to the print server, you need a high-quality USB2.0 HighSpeed \u200b\u200bcable. When using cheap "noodles" communication problems are possible, which will be rather difficult to diagnose, given that the print server does not have very wide capabilities for diagnosing communication with the printer.
	If the print server is connected to the printer via a parallel interface, an already agreed bottleneck appears in the data transfer speed. In this case, you can wait a print on the color printer for quite some time.
	It is extremely rare that through a third-party print server it is possible to connect a GDI printer. There are separate models of print servers optimized for certain printer models (for example, D-Link print servers for working with Canon GDI printers using the CAPT printing system). But in general, connecting to a network of GDI printers through external print servers is a task that does not necessarily have a solution. In fact, more often you have to break off with this than eventually get a working bunch.
	If the printer does not have a developed indication and a software state monitor is used to control it, then it will become impossible to use this program through an external print server, and therefore it will not be possible to monitor the printer and configure / maintain it.

3. Connection through a "native" network card / print server.

Many printers involve installing an internal network card in them, made specifically for this model (or for several models of this manufacturer). In this case, the board is installed on the internal system bus of the printer and therefore data is transferred to the printer at the highest possible speed for the network. In addition, the internal network card allows you to control the printer through the network, and on the other hand, you can change the network card settings through the printer control panel. As you might guess, a “native” network card is an attribute of not the cheapest printers and, being not a universal device produced in relatively small quantities, has a rather high cost.

If our printer is equipped with a network card (either standard or added as an option), then the manufacturer most likely offers the option unattended installation network printer from the disk that came with the printer. In this case, it is enough to indicate that the printer is a network printer and the installer will configure everything automatically. You may only need to specify the IP address of the printer if it was not automatically assigned to it by your DHCP or BOOTP server. Sometimes, if the address is not assigned automatically, you need to set it manually - either from the printer’s control panel or using an external program supplied on disk or available for download on the manufacturer’s website. For example, OKI has such a program called NIC Setup Utility. It allows you to find all OKI network printers on the network and assign them IP addresses and subnet masks. Other manufacturers have similar utilities. An automatic installer located on a company disk usually installs everything necessary for work network drive and we can only wait for the installation process to complete.

If there is no company disk, you must install the components manually. In this case, the installation will not differ from the one described above for the external print server. The only difference may be that an additional IP stack for printing may need to be installed separately manually. I highly recommend doing this rather than using standard system Microsoft TCP / IP Printing, because when you install the proprietary LPR protocol, data transfer will be more stable, faster and you will have several useful functions, such as pooling printers or redirecting prints to alternative network printers.

When installing the driver manually, it is easiest to first install it "on the parallel port" in the same way as described above in the alternative version, and then run the LPR utility to switch the printer to it.

The advantages of this method of connecting to a network printer:

	It is fully integrated, professional solutionthat allows you to implement network printing in the most efficient way
	High speed data transfer to a network printer, not limited to slow interfaces
	The ability to remotely monitor a network printer, including through an internal printer website with tracking of all its states.
	Control network settings cards can be accessed directly from the printer control panel.
	There is no need to use an additional power source or use one of the computers on the network.

Limitations of this method of connecting to a network printer:

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