How I built a wireless HP laser printer + HP network printer in Vista trick

OK I had HP LJ1320 sitting in the other room for a year and not being connected since the room is crowded with my brothers audio stuff. I wanted to make it a network printer in the kitchen, and I wanted it to be wireless.

I have this old Toshiba 3020 laptop for years. It is a very small laptop ultralight with only 32Mb RAM and WIn98SE on it. It has one USB 1.1 port. It will be my Network printer server. Laptop has a PCMCIA card with 100Mbit ethernet that I will use it for connection with my wireless adapter. It is completely silent.

I have a little ASUS external wireless access point/wireless adapter box that can be connected to any UTP network cable and makean instant wireless AP or be used as an ordinary wireless adapter.

So all three were sitting around doing nothing for years.

1. Added a little USB hub to laptop. It provides power for the ASUS external wireless and USB connection to HP.
2. connected ASUS wireless card to the ethernet card on Toshiba, and installed drivers. Now toshiba is on wireless!
3. Installed HP on Toshiba - very hard indeed, since drivers can be found only on CD, and it has no cd drive! SO I managed to install it over wireless network from my other laptop.
4. Share printer.
5. Installed network printer on three XP machines - all three on wired, and one machine is 64-bit XP. No problems at all.
6. Installed Vista network printer on my laptop over wireless and IT DOESN'T PRINT!

So here is something new I have learned - many HP printers don't work as Network printers in Vista - you can add them, but cannot print.

The trick is to add a LOCAL PRINTER and choose network shared printer that should be on the list. In my case it was //toshiba/lj1320. Once installed it works great, but the processing is done client side - meaning on my Vista laptop. It works great.

So at the end I successfuly built a network printer with 10 years of software and hardware difference and with 4 different drivers on 4 different OSes (WInXP, WinXP 64-bit, Vista, Win98SE) and all worked great.

I even put toshiba into the deepest powersave mode, and when it is closed it will turn off and if I open it it turns on immediately - amazing for something that has a 200MHz proc (my mobile phone has a better proc ) and 1 MB RAM free once windows is loaded!

Now since ASUS adapter is still bulky since it needs power from USB and is connected to the PCMCIA ethernet I think I will buy a little USB wireless dongle that will replace the need for PCMCIA ethernet + little cable, small ethernet cable to ASUS, USB power cable for ASUS and finally ASUS wireless box. That way It will look much better!

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Ivan, very slick!