I am interested in connecting my printer to a wireless router. I know that a wireless print server or even a wire print server will do the job but these are a bit expensive.

I was wondering whether it will possibly work if I connect a USB to Ethernet cable to the USB printer and the Ethernet port on the wireless printer. What would be the best type of cable/adaptor to use?

Can anyone advise me if this method will work, or any other inexpensive methods of connection whether it be wired or wireless?

If anyone has any comments , suggestions or advice i would be very grateful for your help.

thank you.

Re: Network printer

No, unfortunately you can't do that. Ethernet is peer to peer. But USB isn't. One device is master, the others are slaves. That's why the two ends of a USB cable are different. So you can't connect two slaves together. Because it won't work. Well, except in very limited circumstances. The master can talk with each slave. Slaves don't know each other exist. You are trying to connect two USB slave devices together.

Maybe they'll get it right with wireless USB.

It would be really nice if printer manufacturers would offer a standard port/socket on all their models that you could plug a standard USB/ethernet/wireless module into. But they don't. They build it. You can only get ethernet and wireless in their higher end models.

The nearest you could get would be to buy an ethernet or wireless print server that has a USB port on it for connecting a printer. They're not cheap. Some routers actually contain a printer server.

Re: Network printer

Slightly confused. Two printers? Wireless network - more than 2 pc's? You can connect both printers to one or two pc's then share them. All pc's will then be able to print to them. Only look at print servers if there is a compelling reason not to locate a printer near a pc.

You can buy a USB to ethernet adaptor, which if combined with a cheap 2 or 4 port USB hub, would allow both to be connected to one USB port.

Chris B

Re: Network printer

Hi,

Apart from the suggestions already posted, if you really need the printer away from your PC's, another alternative is to connect an old PC to it and share the printer that way through the network. The PC does not even need a monitor/keyboard/mouse to run as a Print Server. Just install the OS on it, install the printer, share it, turn it off, unplug monitor/keyboard/mouse and restart the PC.

I use an old Pentium 166MHz with Windows 2000 as my print server. If I need to access the Desktop, I do it through WinVNC and i've only needed to do this about 2 times since I set it up about 3 months ago.

Regards,

Daniel