hi all i've this laser printer that uses a parallel cable (yes it's old but works absolutely fine far better than new ones and has been taken care of). anyway, i was thinking of wiring a network between all my computers and that printer. i wanted to buy a converter that converts parallel into RJ45 and connect the parallel side to the printer and the RJ45 to an eithernet hub/router. question is, will my printer work this way if its driver is installed on all computers? does it need to get an ip bearing in mind that its driver is pretty old and wouldn't support ip thing by any means. is there a solution to wire the printer to all the computers available?
well that would be best way to achive it however can you not just attach the printer to 1 system & allow that machine to share the printer across the entire network[ot]although i dont know how to achive it[/ot] BTW: cant find one yet, will continue looking
I remember from the past (about 10 years ago), there was a box where you could connect the printer. Then you can connect each pc to that box (every connection was labeled from A-F). So then you should label each pc with the letter it was connected to. Then you just need to turn the switch to activate the letter of the pc that needs to print. Or you could connect the printer to one 1, and then create a network. Sharing the printer with all PCs. I don't know if the above solution still exists.
what do you mean by archive it? can do the share printer thing but actually i was asking this because it was a part of a bigger problem. i've the parallel printer an all in one usb printer 3 computers a digital camera usb a pda usb external usb harddisk usb hub 1 wireless router with 4 wired RJ45 sockets the whole point is i want to be able to access all peripherals from all pcs. so basically i've all USB stuff are connected to the usb hub. so i thought of buying a usb/RJ45 converter and plug the hub with the converter to the router. then the other problem is the parallel printer so i thought of using an RJ45/parallel converter and connect the parallel printer to the router. through the router i was thinking if i can access all the peripherals. i just don't want to have a pc open all the time when i need to print from another pc....got my point. what do you think i can do? ... there are these print servers but most of them don't have parallel + usb or if they have they won't have an all in one support. any clue?
In that case you should connect all devices to one pc, and then connect all other PCs to that PC (maybe with a router). And then just share the printer and all your other devices (the camera, harddisk and PDA). edit: the first thing I said, is this device. But with support for more PCs. In that case you got something like this. But you can't connect 1 usb device to more PCs at once, because the device would then get too much power from multiple USB ports.
great sounds like a good idea although i'm a bit reluctant to having one pc ON all the time (or at least when other pcs are being used). i thought there might be a solution that fits within a peer to peer kinda thing. so basically what you are saying is that the converter thing certainly isn't going to work... so there is no need for me to buy them, is that correct? thanks in advance
Yes, that's correct. You can't connect 1 usb device to multiple usb ports. You can however connect multiple usb devices to 1 usb device (but that's not the thing you want). A usb port has 5 volts of power (just as most usb devices). So if you connect it to 3 pcs, you would get 15 volts, so an overcharge.
There are no USB to RJ45 converters that I know of, and even if you could you wouldn't be able to use them over the network. You're better off finding a small print server with parallel ports and connecting it to your network.
They may be a little scarce now, but a print server with a parallel port will probably be fairly inexpensive these days.
