Computers Tips : How to Make a Printer WirelessShow Video Details ↓ Jonathan Ayres: I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success. And today we're going to talk about how to make a printer wireless. This is a very interesting question and I know that today's age of wireless everything, we want to know, gee, can we make our printers wireless? Well yes you can but let's talk about what the choices are and how the easy way is to do as opposed to the hard way. What's the easiest way to make a printer wireless? The easiest way is to buy a printer that is wireless. It's already set up by the manufacturer with the wireless module in it. You bring it home, you plug it in, it connects to your network, you give it a name and then you can access it on your home network from whatever computer is connected to that home network. Let's say for example you have a computer and it's connected to your home network and then you want to connect your current printer wireless. How do you do that? Well, let's think about this for a minute. Here's what you're going to need in order to be able to do that. First of all, you're going to have to have a wireless router in order to broadcast wirelessly inside your house. Here's an example of a wireless router. This is probably one of the common routers ever made in the United States, it's a Linksys model and when you plug your computer and your printer and anything else into this, it will broadcast those devices onto a network, if you set yourself up that way. So, how would we use this to connect to a printer to broadcast wirelessly? We'll here's the next step you have to think about. Your printer has to be able to connect to the back of a wireless router. And how do we do that? We do that by a cable. And that cable is called an Ethernet cable. Here's an Ethernet cable. This Ethernet cable is connected on one end to a printer and we're going to take the other end and plug it right in to the back of this Linksys wireless router. So, we're going to plug that into here and because the printer is ready to go on to the network because it has an Ethernet cable, it's going to be very easy for it to become wireless using this router. What's going to happen, is it's going to go onto the network and we're going to give it a name and an address and then you're going to be able to use that printer from whatever computer you have in your house wirelessly. Now, what if your computer is a wireless computer but your printer does not have a network cable like this Ethernet cable? Well in that case, your printer is going to be connecting to your computer by a USB cable most likely. Could be another cable but that probably what it is. Can you connect this to operate wirelessly? It's going to be very difficult and I would recommend not to do it that way but instead to get a wireless printer or a printer that is network ready. [silence] |