How to share a printer on your home network that doesn’t have a network card

Posted on March 9, 2007 at 4:16 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Network Printing series!

PrinterAnywhere- Network Printing the Easy Way
How to install a network printer on your home or office network
How to share a printer on your home network that doesn’t have a network card
Share printers, files, Windows Media Centers, game consoles over a home network

Do you have a printer at home that’s connected to one computer and whenever you need to print from another computer at home, you have to email yourself the file and then download it on the other computer just to print it!??! Well if you have that problem and would like to be able to print from any computer in your house, then here are the steps to doing it!

First thing are requirements: In order to print from anywhere in the house, all the computer have to be connected to the same network, which means either connected to the same router by wire or you need to have a wireless network setup in your house. That way all the computers can see each other on the network, otherwise if the computers cannot communicate, then there can’t be any sharing!

Step 1: First you need to make sure all the computers are in the same Workgroup. A workgroup is a Windows term that basically means a group of computers that have something in commom and can communicate together. So to make sure all the computers are in the same group, you need to click on Start, and then Control Panel. Once you are there, click Switch To Classic View in the upper left corner. Now click on the System icon. Click on the Computer Name tab. Click the Change button at the bottom of the dialog box.

You should see this:

There are two options listed here: Member of Domain (usually for corporate offices) and Workgroup (which is what we need to use for home). Select Workgroup and type in a name to describe your home network, something short like HOME. Remember, you can’t put any spaces or symbols into the name and this is preferable because you want it to be easy to remember!

Once you type in the name, click OK and then OK again and Windows will ask you to restart the computer for the changes to take effect. Go ahead and do this. In the meantime you can do these same steps for the other computers in your house that you want to connect to the printer.

Now that all the comptuers are in the same group, let’s get to actually sharing the printer. Go to the comptuer that the printer is connected to and click on Start and then Printers and Faxes:

Next, you should see an icon for the printer in the list. Right-click on the printer icon and select Properties. On the dialog box, select the Sharing tab:

Click the Share this printer radio button and type in a name for the share name. The share name is basically what you want the name to be when others look at the printer from their computers. Again, here you need to type a short name with no spaces or symbols, something like HPHome or HPPrint is fine.

Click OK and you’ll see the printer icon looks a different now:

This means that the printer is currently being shared and now we will be able to find it from the other computers. However, before we go to the other computers, we need one more piece of information from the comptuer that is connected to the printer: the name of the computer.

If you don’t know the name of the computer, you can follow these steps: Click on Start and then Run.

Then when the Run dialog comes up, type in CMD and click OK:

This will bring up the Command Prompt window and at the prompt, type in the word “hostname” without the quotes and press Enter:

This is the name of your computer. You’ll need this later on when we try to connect from the other computers to this one. Ok, so now we can go to Computer B that you would like to use so that you can print without having to connect directly to the printer.

Click Start and then Printers & Faxes. In the dialog, clikc Add a Printer from the upper left corner.

When you see the Welcome to the Add Printer wizard, go ahead and click Next. On the next screen where it asks you what type of printer you want to connect to, choose “A network printer or a printer attached to another computer” option and click Next.

In the next screen, you want to choose “Connect to this printer (or to browse for a printer…)” option and in the text box you will now need to type two forward slashes, “\\” followed by the computer name that we found out earlier, followed by another slash and then the name you chose for the shared printer (in our example HPHome).

Click Next and Windows will try to connect to the printer. It should find it without a problem and then you can click Next and Finish. If however, it does not find it, clear out the entire text box and click Next. Windows will try and find all the computers on the network automatically and it will give you a list of computers of which you can then double click and it will show any shared printers.

Once you double click the name and click Next, the wizard will ask you if you want this to be your default printer or not. Choose Yes or No. After that, you’re done!!! The wizard will automatically download the driver from the other computer, so you don’t have to install the drivers yourself.

Remember, since the other computers are connecting to the main computer attached to the printer, the main computer must be on at all times. Or at least when you want to be able to print from somewhere else. That’s why this method is only good for a home setup, where the main computer stays in one place and is mostly kept on.

Enjoy your new freedom to print from anywhere!!! I’ll also post how to connect a network printer! That’s a lot easier than this procedure and it allows you to print without having to connect through another computer.