Windows 7 : Using a Windows Network - Sharing Printers

You can share any of your “local” printers so that other people on the network can use it. A “local” printer is any printer that is directly cabled to your computer, or to which you connected via the network using LPR or other direct network protocols.

To be sure that printer sharing is enabled, do the following. You should only need to do this once.

Now you can share any printer that is attached to your computer. To share a printer, follow these steps:

1.	Click Start, Devices and Printers.
2.	Right-click a printer that you’d like to share and select Printer Properties. This is near the middle of the right-click menu; you don’t want the last entry labeled just “Properties.”
3.	Select the Sharing tab.
4.	If Share This Printer isn’t already checked, check it. Windows will fill in a share name for the printer, as shown in Figure 1. If you like, you can shorten or simplify it. Figure 1. Enabling sharing for a printer.
5.	Click OK.

In most cases, that’s all you need to do. In some cases you might wish to change some the advanced settings described in the next few sections, but these are optional.

Setting Printer Permissions

If you have a workgroup network and have disabled Password Protected Sharing, or if you have set up a homegroup, you don’t need to worry about setting permissions for printers: anyone can use your shared printer. If you’re on a domain network, or have chosen to use detailed user-level permissions on your workgroup network, you can control access to your shared printers with security attributes that can be assigned to users or groups, as shown in Figure 2 and described next:

Figure 2. The Security tab lets you assign printer-management permissions for users, groups, and the creator of each print job.

You don’t have to change any of the default permission settings, unless you want to restrict the use of the printer to just specific users on your network. If this is the case, open Devices and Printers, right-click the printer whose settings you want to change, and select Printer Properties. View the Security tab. Select group Everyone, and click Remove. Then, click Add to add specific users or groups, and give them Print permission. (You could also give someone Manage This Printer or Manage Documents, if you really do want to let them change the printer’s settings or delete other users’ print jobs.)

Don’t change the CREATOR OWNER entry, however. It should have the Manage Documents permission checked so that a user can delete his or her own print jobs from the queue.

Changing the Location of the Spool Directory

When jobs are queued up to print, Windows stores the data it has prepared for the printer in a folder on the computer that’s sharing the printer. Data for your own print jobs and for any network users will all end up on your hard drive temporarily. If the drive holding your Windows folder is getting full and you’d rather house this print data on another drive, you can change the location of the spool directory.

To change the location of the Windows print spooler folder, follow these steps:

Printer Pooling

If your network involves heavy-duty printing, you might find that your printers are the bottleneck in getting your work done. One solution is to get faster printers, and another is to add multiple printers. But, if you have two printers shared separately, you’ll have to choose one for your printing, and you’ll almost certainly encounter bank-line syndrome: The other line always seems to move faster.

The way around this problem is to use printer pooling. You can set up one printer queue that sends its output to two or more printers. The documents line up in one list, and the printers take jobs from the front of the line, first come, first served.

To set up pooled printers, follow these steps:

That’s all there is to it; Windows passes print jobs to as many printers as you select on the Ports tab.