How to Build a Print Server From an Old Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to create a print server from an old computer that you have in your house. The first thing that you have to do is get your computer's network together. This is a very easy process, but I'm not going to go over it now. I'm going to assume that you've already gotten your network set up. Creating a network printer is easy after that step. Let's go to the server. This is an old computer that I'm using as a server. I have a printer installed on it. The way I can get to the printer is just by clicking on Start, go into Control Panel, and selecting Printers. There is my printer that I'm going to share out to my client. All I have to do is right click on it, go to Sharing, and select Share this printer. Now, I'm going to call it HP printer, and we're going to apply that. The next step to get my computers to connect is to make sure that I know the IP address I'm going to be connecting my clients to. Click on start, go to Run, type CMD, as in the word command, press OK. Let's type ipconfog, all one word, and that will return back to me the IP address of the server; in this case, 192.168.1.53. Let's go to one of our clients, and we're going to connect to that remote computer. We click on the Start button and open up computer. To connect to the printer click click in this address bar at the top and do two backslashes, as in http://when you're going to a website. Just use the two backslashes and type in the IP address that we just looked up, which is 192.168.1.53. Now you can see here, my HP printer is in this list because I just shared it out. To connect to it all you have to do is right click on it and select connect. Now that we've connected our printer let's minimize this, click back on the Start bar down at the bottom. Let's go to Control Panel, and we're going to select printers out of this list. As you can see, installed right there is HP printer on 192.168.1.53. It's a very easy method to share out printers on your network and connect to them. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to convert an old PC into a print server."