The days of the single family laptop are over, as many households tend to have more than one computer in the home.
Whereas the desktop PC used to sit in the corner of the room, now laptops and tablets are used around the house as we carry them between rooms depending on the task in hand. The advent of wireless computing means these systems are also more likely to be connected to a network, even if it’s just small home network between broadband connection and laptop.
The advantage of sharing your Internet connection between computers is fairly obvious, but there are other added side benefits to this home networking explosion. Now it is extremely easy for one family with lots of different PCs all in different rooms to share a printer. That means you don’t need an inkjet in every room guzzling up expensive ink and you can all use just the one device.
To share a printer across your network it has to be connected to a PC, but setting it up is really easy. Go to the Settings Charm and click on Change PC Settings. Click on HomeGroup and then under Printer and devices switch sharing on. You may need to add the devices’ own printer software as well to manage further options so in the Change PC Settings screen click Devices to add the appropriate software from here.
When you open the print dialog (ctrl +p) click on Change… under Destination and then Show all under Local Destinations to see the shared printer and select it.
Visit the Dell Tech Zone for more advice on family computing.
Comments