Things to Consider Before Buying a Wireless Printer

As home and small-network users struggle to free themselves from tangled yards of Ethernet cables, more consumers are looking for wireless printers. When I was a printer sales rep in stores such as Circuit City and Best Buy, a lot of the consumers I met had huge misconceptions about whether they needed a printer with built-in wireless connectivity.

The question customers ask is almost always universally the same: If I want to print from my laptop/PDA/computer in another room, do I need a printer with built in wireless networking?

The answer varies greatly depending on how your home/small office network is set-up. For example, users that have a desktop computer with a wireless router and one laptop already have wireless printing and often don't realize it. In my own home office, which I share with my partner, we have his PC hooked up to our cable modem and a wireless router. When I wanted to print directly from my Macintosh Powerbook, all I had to do was:

1. Turn on Printer Sharing in Windows XP on the "base" computer.
2. Install the appropriate PPD on my Powerbook
3. Select and create the Remote Printer I wanted to use on my Mac.

Voila! Wireless printing with no network card built-in. Printer Sharing works just as well from Windows Desktop to a Windows laptop as well.

For users with a larger home network, like a family, it may be worth the investment to buy a dedicated print server. They retail for around $70 - $100 at consumer electronic stores and can handle the network traffic and spooling better. Using a dedicated print server will also help free up processing resources on your base desktop machine as well. If you have Mom, Dad and 2 kids all trying to print at the same time, you don't necessarily want your main desktop computer attempting to process all those requests; especially if you're using it at the time.