How do i setup my printer on a wireless network. printer does not have bluetooth or anything like that. I know it can be done but cant figure it out. any tips or how to advise would help.

Well Walkon, I could use some more information such as what OS you are using on your network & is your printer network ready?

In general here’s what you want to do:

Best choice – use a network ready printer. This way all you do is plug your printer into your router (have your router assign a permanent IP address), install printer drivers on your computers and point them to the printers IP address.

If your printer is not network ready you could buy a printer server devise. You would plug your printer into the print server and then you could address the printer by way of an IP address.  I have not used a print server in a few years but going back two or three years,  I did not find them very reliable but I would think they have fixed most of those issues by now.

The cheapest way to go is connect the printer right to one of your computers and share it with the network. There are a few drawbacks to this however.

1. You need to keep the computer that the printer is connected to, on 24/7 (this is not a bad thing, I never turn off my desktop computers, only my laptops) the reason being, if you are downstairs and send the print job to your computer upstairs,  you’ll need to run upstairs to boot up the computer before you can use it’s printer.

2. You could bog down the computer the printer is connected to depending on the size of your print job and how much ram your printer has;  if no one is on that computer it’s not a issue.

Hope this helped! If you would like you could PM me and I’ll try and walk you through it.

The best and easiest way to set up a printer on your home network is to buy a Network Printer. A network printer is a printer that has an RJ45 jack (looks like a phone jack but just a little bigger) built into the printer.

You’ll connect your printer directly to your router using a network cable connected to both the router and printers RJ45 jacks. This will allow you to print to your printer whether you are hard wired to the network or from a wireless (WiFi) connection.

Use the software that comes with your printer to set it up and follow their direction. You can also use your OS software (2000,XP,Vista etc..) to set up the printer to work with your computers but the software that comes with the printer usually makes it a painless setup.

Another way to do it is to connect a regular printer up to one of your computers (this computer will need to be on in order for the printer to work). Go into your control panel or click on Printer & Faxes from the Start menu. Right click on the printer you want to connect to and set up sharing. If your not sure of something hit the F1 key to bring up help. The information in the help area can walk you through the whole setup procedure.

There is a third way of doing this and that’s to buy a print server device, however I have yet to find one that lives up it’s task.

Watch the video below for a step by step demonstration on setting up a printer on your home XP network.