Network Printers – Share your resources.
Imagine buying a separate printer for each of the computers in the organization and you would see your costs rising considerably. Networking printers lead to a considerable decrease in costs and efficient utilization of the resources in the organization. Hence we may conclude that when you have more than one computer in your house or in your organization, then it is better to have a network printer that is connected to all the other computers. You can then design your network setup in such a way that a few or all computers can give print jobs to the networking printer. You can also setup preferences as to which computer can have more priority over the print jobs. Setting up a network printer in a home or office environment is very easy with the graphical user interface of the Windows operating system. Buying a network printer is prudent because you can buy a better printer than buying ordinary printers for each of the computers. Hence in the end you stand to save a lot of money and also get a better quality printer. Once you decide to install a network printer in the home or office environment, you will also have to decide on the network features to be used. For example, you will have to decide to share the network printer through a print server or you can install the printer on a computer and instruct the operating system to make that computer as a print server.
Today all the network printers, consist of a network interface which is popularly known as the network interface or NIC in short. The most common type of NIC in Windows computers is TCP/IP and the most common type of NIC in Apple computers is AppleTalk. Many network printers of today even have built in web pages that let you know the status of all the settings of the printer as well as let you change the printer settings. Hence even you as a novice user can change the settings of the network printer through the user friendliness of the web browser. In case there are a lot of network printers in different departments in the organization, then the administrator can resort to creating groups of users giving then certain limited access to the network printers.