How to Add a TCP/IP Printer to Your Computer

If you are on a network and have printers with network cards and a static IP address then you might want to think about adding these printers to your available printers that you can print to. To do this you can simple create a TCP/IP port and map the printer to your computer locally and can print to your hearts content. This might sound hard but it's actually fairly simple and in just a few simple steps you can have a printer mapped via an IP address.

First step is to make sure you have the correct printer IP address, if you don't know and aren't provided with it most printers will give you an information page with the IP address on it. You will want to look up your printer and find out how to get this information page; most printers have a button or a sequence of buttons to push to print this page. Once you have the correct IP address you are ready to go.

Go to the Start button in the lower left hand corner of your page and then go to Settings. In the settings you will want to choose the Printers and Faxes option which will open a new window for you. In the left hand panel of this window you will see the add a printer option, click this and it opens the wizard that we will be using to add our printer. In the first window you will want to click next, this will bring up the second step where you will want to choose the option "Local printer attached to this computer" and then make sure that the second option "Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printers" is not selected. Once you have these two options selected correctly click next, in the new window you will want to click on the radio button that says "Create a new port" and in the drop down you will want to select "Standard TCP/IP Port" and then click next.

A new window opens up and you will want to click Next for the first window, now is where the IP is important the computer will ask you to put in the IP address. Your IP should be in a format much like this 192.192.XX.XX, once you have entered your IP address then click next, if it was the right IP you will get a window that has the printer IP listed and the type of network card the printer has and you can click finish.