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Printers: Just Make It Go Already!
I'm having a vocabulary problem. I can only explain the techy device I need with handwaving and Google doesn't speak, "Ya know, like *this*, with the dongle and the wooosh wooosh, so it works!"
I have an ancient laser printer which uses parallel ports. I bought an adapter thing so it could be connected to a computer that doesn't have a parallel port. But that printer needs a new toner cartridge and it's mega slow. (Like upwards of 5 minutes per page.) So between when I got the adapter thing and when we stopped having a parallel port computer in active use, we got a multi-function printer/scanner/copier thingy. It's by Brother and prints in color.
Now that I have a laptop, I find it incredibly irritating to have to boot my old computer and watch it struggle to load web pages (the main reason I wanted to upgrade in the first place) and flail over starting Acrobat Reader to display PDFs. The Brother printer uses USB. So I could plug it into my laptop. But this still doesn't solve the fact that Simon wants to print things sometimes.
Our TiVo is so old that it came with a modem and would call up the TiVo servers, eventually we shelled out for a wireless USB thingy which allowed the TiVo to be on the network and just download whatever it needs via wifi.
We have an internal protected wifi network. (No idea how secure the security is, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to add devices to the approved list, so there's certainly a hassle involved and there are unsecured networks all over my apartment building, so I'm sure bandwidth thieves will look for easier targets.) My laptop doesn't have cords plugged in except for the charging.
What do I need to make the printer like the TiVo, where it can see the network? Is there a version of that device which could have the Brother printer drivers loaded into it so I don't have to worry about updating every single machine we own with the revised printer/scanner drivers?
I have an ancient laser printer which uses parallel ports. I bought an adapter thing so it could be connected to a computer that doesn't have a parallel port. But that printer needs a new toner cartridge and it's mega slow. (Like upwards of 5 minutes per page.) So between when I got the adapter thing and when we stopped having a parallel port computer in active use, we got a multi-function printer/scanner/copier thingy. It's by Brother and prints in color.
Now that I have a laptop, I find it incredibly irritating to have to boot my old computer and watch it struggle to load web pages (the main reason I wanted to upgrade in the first place) and flail over starting Acrobat Reader to display PDFs. The Brother printer uses USB. So I could plug it into my laptop. But this still doesn't solve the fact that Simon wants to print things sometimes.
Our TiVo is so old that it came with a modem and would call up the TiVo servers, eventually we shelled out for a wireless USB thingy which allowed the TiVo to be on the network and just download whatever it needs via wifi.
We have an internal protected wifi network. (No idea how secure the security is, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to add devices to the approved list, so there's certainly a hassle involved and there are unsecured networks all over my apartment building, so I'm sure bandwidth thieves will look for easier targets.) My laptop doesn't have cords plugged in except for the charging.
What do I need to make the printer like the TiVo, where it can see the network? Is there a version of that device which could have the Brother printer drivers loaded into it so I don't have to worry about updating every single machine we own with the revised printer/scanner drivers?