Will this work?

[drcal]

My daughter has come to me with this proposed solution for her home network. Please help me with this.
She wants to do a wireless connection between her laptop and her HP Officejet 6110 (old house with no way to run wire). She found the Netgear FWG114P that combines a wireless access point, router and USB print server and it seemed ideal, but...
As I have researched this folks warn about the lack of bidirectionality, why should I care?
She is not concerned about scanning or faxing or copying wirelessly, she can go to the den and connect directly the few times she wants to do that. All she wants to do with the wireless connection is print, and that would pretty much just be B&W documents for work and school. Also she would be connecting to the internet with DSL connected to the router.
Would this be possible?
Are there special considerations for setting up the printer when it is used wirelessly, or will the HP drivers that came with it work?

 

[JackMDS]

Welcome to the Network Forum.

The majority of Bidirectional Printer would work without Bi-Direction connection. You usually lose the Printer feedback (like low ink, paper out etc.). The native HP driver should be fine.

I have no experience with your printer; however some Bi-Directional Printer will not work with Network hardware.

Buy in a place that you can return if does not work.

 

[Cheetah8799]

There are stand-alone print servers that are wireless. More expensive because you have to buy another piece to your network, but if you need bi-directional maybe some other products can provide it for you.

I agree with JackMDS. Try to buy/borrow something that you can return if it doesn't work.

I'm not sure how all print servers work, but I know in Windows NT/2k/XP you can setup another "port" when you add the printer, so instead of selecting USB or LPT1, you select the new port, which is really the IP of the print server. Might be different on some print servers, but that's how it's done on HP JetDirect servers.