Author Topic: Question about sharing resources using a router  (Read 224 times)

Offline beet1e

  • Persona Non Grata
  • Platinum Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 7848
Question about sharing resources using a router
« on: November 04, 2005, 11:03:58 AM »
When I have house guests, they connect their laptop to the internet using a 5 metre ethernet cable plugged into one of the spare ports on my router. Works fine, but...

... is there any way to share my USB printer with a laptop connected via the router in this way? Is it possible for the guest laptop and my PC to share files via the router?

Offline eagl

  • Platinum Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 6769
Question about sharing resources using a router
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2005, 03:40:34 PM »
Enable file and printer sharing on all the computers, and then share the printer by right-clicking on the printer icon in control panel printers, and selecting "sharing".

You'll have to make sure that all the computers are configured with the same workgroup, and you can check that by right-clicking on my computer, selecting properties, and choosing the "computer name" tab.

After that, to print all you should have to do is use the my network places folder to browse the workgroup computers, or alternately use the add printer wizard on the guest computers, select the add network printer option, and enter in the address.  The address will be something like \\computername\printername

For example, my computer is named "mercury", and my printer is shared as "hpdj952c".  So to find that printer on the network, I can browse to the computer \\mercury and find the printer, or directly link to it when asked for the computer name by entering \\mercury\hpdj952c

It's really much easier than it sounds but if it's your first time, you may want to run the home network setup wizard to get started.  That should at least let you enable file/print sharing and set the workgroup name.
Everyone I know, goes away, in the end.

Offline beet1e

  • Persona Non Grata
  • Platinum Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 7848
Question about sharing resources using a router
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2005, 09:35:58 AM »
Thanks eagl - got it working! :aok:cool: