On 07/12/2014 20:59, micky wrote:
My friend didn't think about wireless or laptops and bought a printer
without wireless. It connects ONLY by USB. It's too late to return
it.

a) I know you can disconnect a USB harddrive by just pulling the cord
out, or you risk losing data**, but what's the most damage you could do
just by unplugging a printer? Interrupt the job and have to print it
again? And not even that if your last print job has already printed?
Or if it had stopped with an error message? Maybe he can just
transfer the cable from the desktop to the laptop when he wants to
print.

b) Or he can leave the printer connected to his desktop computer and if
there were some sort of Y USB connector, maybe he could just plug the
laptop in to the other fork of the Y. The Y's are called hubs, but I
think of them as outgoing to more than one add-on device. Especially
powered hubs. Would it work to plug the common port of a hub into the
printer, one of the multiple ports into the desktop, and when needed
plug the laptop in one of the other mulitple ports. (I don't know what
words to use for common and mulitple. I mean input and output, but in
this case the data would be going the opposite direction.)

I'm interested in all this myself, so any answers for a PC are greatly
appreciated.

OTOH, he has a Mac. Does that make a difference?

Or maybe he can make it wireless.
c) I think the cheapest wireless print server I found online was 20
dollars if no one else bids. Used of course. Would anyone buy that, or
would you just buy a new wireless printer? If you're curious, here's
its ad.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LevelOne-WPS...em20f186d1 15
auction ends at 10:30 tonight Sunday EST

d) Hmmm. I have a USB equivalent of an internal wifi card, to receive
signals from the router. If it can receive internet signals from the
router, can it plug into a USB printer and make a printer accept,
printer text signals from the same router, coming from the local network
computer instead of the the DSL modem?
(I suppose not, or I'd have heard about it, but I don't know why it
wouldn't.)



**What if you absolutely know you haven't written to a USB hard drive
for the last 10 minutes. Is there a chance of losing data or damaging
the structure by just pulling out the USB cord, or by turning off t he
power to the external drive??

Thanks.



All printers I have seen so far are wireless so god knows what it means
in your post. However, some computers can be networked and accessed
wirelessly so you need to tell us what exactly are you trying to do.

To network a printer, it needs to have a network card and some machines
come with the card like the HP ones I buy and on some you can insert a
network card. On some it is almost impossible to insert the card and so
they can be connected using what was called in the XP days as P2P. I
don't use XP anymore so I won't talk about this anymore.

Basically, the printer in connected to one computer and then all other
machines can connect to this computer to print something - this could be
wirelessly if you want it or using the cable.

Hope you get the idea.