Printer is 30 feet away

[Jjoshua2]

My friend has two pc and a laptop. His pc is on a desk with a printer, and he normally keeps his laptop on a desk in another room about 30 feet away. The longest usb extensions are 16 feet it seems, so one option is to get two usb extenders in a chain, I don't like that idea since it seems like it might not be reliable.

The other thing would be to get a usb/bluetooth adapter like this http://www.buy.com/prod/belkin-bluetoot...0-meter-f8t031/q/loc/101/10360620.html
However, I'm not sure how reliable bluetooth is either. My brother had a bluetooth mouse that wasn't very good.

Maybe a third thing would be to get a router with a usb printer port in it and run ethernet instead. We have a linksys router/print hub, and it caused trouble, such as whenever the printer ran out of paper everything had to be unplugged and powered off before it would work again.

What do you think I should do? I told him he could just get another printer, but he said he likes this one, a high-speed laser.

 

[Trashman]

If your on a network now, i would try another print server or connect printer directly to 1 computer and just use print sharing on network, granted that machine would have to be left on to print.
Bluetooth option is ok i guess, but then you would need bluetooth on your other 2 systems, correct?
figure in 20-30 bux ea. adapter. buy.com has combo for 112.00

 

[Jjoshua2]

Ok, I kinda mixed up to scenarios in my last post. They are two different networks. Ours and my friends. Our is just fine, we replaced the linkysys print server with a buffalo linkstation hard drive which has a usb port and a gigabit router. We haven't had any trouble since, so we are good to go.

Now for my friend. He doesn't have any wiring yet. Just a pc and a tablet pc, which I'm guessing has bluetooth already. How can I tell? His pc is plugged into the printer with a parallel port, and now he just brings his computer over and uses the mini usb port on the printer (it has both usb and parallel). So the pc is fine, but it would be nice if he could print from his tablet pc from the other room.

 

[Trashman]

I guess it would depend on what sort of network capabilities the TabletPC has.
Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
if your not sure what it has, check specs online or look in device manager for what hardware it has

 

[Jjoshua2]

I know it has Wi-Fi cause I tested that on his Tablet. He bought the tablet used, so I'm not sure exactly what all the specs are on it.

 

[Trashman]

Then i would suggest he network his TabletPC and Desktop, with wi-fi router.
30ft. doesn't seem all that bad where he would have problems going wireless, does his desktop have a network card in it?

 

[Jjoshua2]

Network them and share the printer from the desktop? That sounds like a pretty good solution. I'm going over there tomorrow, so I can check to see if he has a NIC in his desktop. I think he probably does, since its about a four year old dell with Windows 2000.

 

[Roguestar]

Yeah, sounds to me like you just need to set up a small network with file/print sharing between the dekstop and tablet, and it should be able to print from the shared printer. However in my experience, from time to time windows 2000 and windows XP don't seem to like talking to each other on networks; sometimes the win2k machine can see the XP machine but the XP machine can't see the win2k machine. Seems rather temperamental to me.

 

[Zepper]

Wireless USB hub? I know that at least YE Data had one in the works that should be available by now.

.bh.

 

[Jjoshua2]

It turned out my friend already had a wireless router he wasn't using! So I set him up a with a printer share on his desktop, so now he can print wirelessly, and he is thrilled. Thanks for the ideas guys!