How do wifi printers work if your computer doesnt have wifi?

Question

my home network has 2 soon to be 3 laptops and 2 desktops that are connected directly to the router. we have 3 printers right now and its getting annoying moving them and transporting them and buying ink so we want to buy one printer (wireless) and have them all print to it... can we do that if some of the printers are connected to the router wirelessly and some by the cable? if so how would that work...

Answer 1

You would treat the wireless printer as another device on your network. In order to send a print job to it, you need to have the printer network (IP) address and viewable to the other devices on your network. In addition, you'll need to enable network-based printing for your computers.

I'll assume for a moment that you are using some Windows-based OS. Here's an example for network printing using Windows XP and an HP printer. You can substitute the directions for the HP printer with the model you have: http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/WinXP...

Answer 2

I want to point out that you could do the same with one of the printers you currently have. Take the best one, and hook it up to one of the desktops, and then simply share it via your home network. That way you only have 1 printer, and all the computers in your home could print to it.

The downside would be that the computer its hook up to would have to turned on in order for the other computers to have access to it, I would probably just leave of the desktops running.