small(cheap)network

[imported_joetech]

My wife's preschool had a little $ left over and she bought two new Dells to replace some ancient ones she bought a few years ago for $20.00 each. She now has an 5 year old gateway and the 2 Dells. The kids will use two of them and she will use one for record keeping, newsletters etc. The other Dell will also be used by the other teachers for the same thing with password protection. She also got a new printer.
My question is: how can I best hook up the printer to both of the new Dells? Now it is connected to the one with a USB ports. Could I use a USB hub to link the other Dell? She wants to put the old printer (one of the colors doesn't work anymore) to the kids only computer. All of these computer are in the same area so cabling isn't that big of a deal. Printer servers and kind of expensive. Any suggestions?

 

[RJR2006]

hmmm. I suggest that the preschool's IT Technician should set up a LAN and set permissions for the teachers' printer and kids will not have access to that printer. Instead, have the administrator add groups for example:

Teachers:
TEACHER NAME #1
TEACHER NAME #2
TEACHER NAME #3


Kids:
Boy
Girl
......

The kids can be only granted to access the old printer when "kids" is added to the group

 

[JackMDS]

You can not use USB Hub for such a purpose you might end up frying the computers because of the USB's +5V usage on each computer.

You can set the printer a share and than it can be used by others.

:sun:

 

[ktwebb]

Any windows machine can act as a print server. Just do as jack suggested. Make sure file and printer sharing is enabled and share the printer.

 

[imported_joetech]

I am the preschool's IT tech. (I work cheap). The school's total budget for EVERYTHING is less than $25K per year. Do you mean to suggest I should network the two computer (or three)? The new Dells are using XP Home and the Gateway has ME. I thought there was suppose to be a problem networking XP home. I think I have an A/B switch somewhere so I could use a parallel printer cables instead of the USB cables. Is there such a thing as a USB A/B switch?