From the course: Setting Up a Small-Office Network

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Sharing printers using print servers

Sharing printers using print servers

From the course: Setting Up a Small-Office Network

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Sharing printers using print servers

- In this section, I'd like to talk about printers and sharing printers. On a small network we essentially have three different ways we can share a printer. We could connect the printer to a PC, so someone's normal work station could have a printer connected to it. We could connect the printers to a server, so we could have a server purposefully built for printer connections that would be called a print server, or many printers now allow direct connection to the network, where we can plug a network cable directly into the printer, and don't have to go through a PC or a server. So let's talk about each of these options. Connecting a printer to a PC, in my experience can typically cause some performance problems. If you have multiple people printing through one PC, that can become a heavy load on that PC, and that can deteriorate performance. So I typically try to avoid having a shared printer hooked up to someone's work station. We also have to question the availability. If someone…

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