Learn How To Share A Single Printer with Multiple Computers

Sharing a Printer on a Network:

Why buy a new printer for each computer in the house?
With a network, you don't have to.

To set up your main computer, the one with the printer you want to share, (we will call this rig the HOST) just follow these steps:

Click Start, Settings, Control Panel.
Click Network.
On the Configuration tab, click File and Print Sharing.
Select the check box, I want to be able to give others access to my files and I want to be able to allow others to print to my printer (see the image below).
Click OK.

File and
Print Sharing dialog box

Or you can get to the configuration tab by right-clicking Network Neighborhood from the control panel. I always prefer the shortcut.

How do I set up my other computer?

To set up print-sharing on one or more of your other network rig(s), go to that computer and do the following:

Click Start, Settings, Printers.
Click Add Printer, which launches the Add Printer Wizard.
Click Next.
Select Network Printer and click Next.

To allow your computer to find the shared printer, you must specify its location. Click Browse if you are unsure, (c'mon, just hit Browse, you know you don't know the "path"), then select the designated printer.
An icon of a hand should appear under the printer icon after it becomes shared, just like it does when you share a file, folder or drive.

By the way, for networks to function, all of the computers must be identified or named separately. If you haven't already given your computer a name (you can call it anything your heart desires, but let's try to keep it clean ok?), here's how you can "name" your rig:

Click Start, Settings, Control Panel
Click the Network icon
Select the Identification tab. Enter a name in the box.
You can name it anything you want. Try to keep the name in the Workgroup the same on all of the computers in your network. This just makes things a little simpler.

But what if I have more than one printer?

You can set up more than one printer to be shared on your home network. You'll just have to repeat the steps above on each rig. You can also set one printer as your default printer (default means the one it always goes to first, like the first choice). To set one as the default printer:

Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Printers.
Right-click the icon for the printer you want to use as the default printer.
Click Set As Default.
If there is a check mark next to this command, the printer is already set as the default printer.

This trick is an excellent way to have multiple computers without having to fork out the extra cash to buy each rig it's own printer. Now ya gotta love that! Remember though, the main computer (or the Host) must be running for the other computers to use the printer, unless you have what is called a "printer server" installed. I'll explain that some other time.