Printer sharing was a great idea but its days are numbered. You already know how it goes: You're in the family room with a laptop and you need to print something on the printer attached to the desktop in the bedroom that's become the home office. You click the Print icon and then make the pilgrimage to wake up the desktop or call out and hope someone's near enough to wake it up.

This printer fit right into our Mac household which includes a MacBook that occasionally runs Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. The WiFi setup was delightfully boring using the network cable method. And, hey, who DOESN'T have an extra network cable around the house? You follow the step-by-step instructions without compromising your WiFi security. When you're finished, you unplug the network cable and you're printing wirelessly (is that a real word?) from anywhere in the house.

Setting up the printer in Windows via Boot Camp was like adding any other network printer. I needed only to pick the IP address of the printer itself (not the wireless print server's IP address) and in seconds a Windows XP Printer Test Page floated into the output tray. Ubuntu found the printer all by itself and installed its own CUPS (Common UNIX Printing Solution) driver.

Brother has even tucked a mini web server inside, giving you web browser access to important information about the printer. Just open your favorite web browser and type in the printer's IP address. A wealth of information appears and tells you more than any front-panel display while saving the paper and toner you'd waste on configuration, status and maintenance reports.

If at least half of what you print is black and white text and you already have a wireless router, you NEED this printer. Inkjet ink is just too expensive for that, and printer sharing is SO last century.