Sharing A Network Printer If you have a network, you can save resources by sharing your printer on the network. Keep in mind that you will be installing the printer on a PC, so that computer will become the print server and will need to be left on when others need access to the printer. You can also invest in a print server, which is a tiny box that resides on the network and connects directly to the printer. This tutorial, however, deals with sharing a printer attached to a host PC.

Turn on Printer Sharing Once the printer is successfully installed and tested, you must enable printer sharing before the printer can be accessed by other users on the network. Go to Start, Printers and Faxes and click on the printer you want to share. To the left, you might see a menu that says “Share This Printer.” If not, right-click the printer, then choose Properties. Under the Sharing tab, tick the box that says “Share This Printer.” Next, enter a name for the printer. You can call it anything you want, just make it an easy name everyone can remember. If you have computers running multiple versions of Windows, you will also want to install different drivers for the printer. You will see a box for that below the Share Name of the printer. Have the CD handy to load additional drivers. But if you're using Windows XP, and so is everyone else, just skip that part. Accessing Shared Printer Now that sharing is setup on the host PC, you'll want to install the printer on other computers networked in your home or office. Each PC will be configured the same, and all you'll need to know is that share name we setup above. On the client machines, click Start, Printers and Faxes, then Add a Printer. The Printer Wizard should start, so click Next when asked. On the Local or Network Printer page, select A Network Printer Or A Printer Attached To Another Computer. You will then be able to Browse for a printer or enter it's share name. The browse feature should work fine, so try that first. If it doesn't locate the printer, try adding the share name. So if the host PCs computer name is Office and the share name is HPPrinter, you will enter \\Office\HPPrinter in the Name dialog box. Troubleshooting Printer Sharing Sometimes a third party firewall installed on a host machine will block attempts to setup printer sharing. Configure the firewall to allow this, or disable the firewall completely.

1. How to Install a Network Printer
2. Installing A Printer
3. Kill Print Jobs Stuck in Queue
4. Printer Maintenance Kit