Moving the printers off the floor.
Pros:
It worked really well for me and the setup was a snap.
Cons:
None that I've found yet.
The Bottom Line:
If you have a small wired network at home, this will allow you to place your printer(s) anywhere and not have to keep a PC on all the time.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I'm not sure how it happened but we ended up with two printers in our house, both of which were carefully stored on the floor in the dining room to be kicked whenever anyone walked in. During a major renovation of the house, I put in a 10/100 network with two RJ45 sockets in every room, so the time came to relocate the printers to a dedicated spot in the house. I needed a wired print server for the printers, and the D-Link DP300U seemed like just the ticket. One printer is an old HP Laserjet 6MP with a parallel interface, and the other is a newer Canon S630 colour inkjet with a USB interface. I think the DP300U is the only device that supports both parallel AND USB at the same time. The problem with not having a print server - the old way we had it set up - is that you always need a PC on somewhere with the printers connected to it. That's pretty wasteful of electricity, plus if you have a wireless network attached to it, you're inviting disaster from drive-by hackers.
So I bought the DP300U and read all the horror stories on Amazon about people who hadn't managed to set it up correctly, and IT guys going on about how it took them two hours to get any life out of it.
Honestly I don't know what they're talking about. I followed the instructions to the letter and within 5 minutes had both my printers online with the print server running. Running XP, the setup that D-Link recommend is to set the printers up as local printers through a TCP-IP interface. I'd never heard of this before but the D-link instruction sheet was pretty clear on how to do it.
There's a couple of things to look out for though.
First, if you're going to do this, it's wise to install the printer drivers on the PC's you want to use this server first. At the end of the setup process, XP asks what the printer is (because the D-link box isn't a server that can handle printer drivers). If you don't already have the printer driver installed, it means you have to back out and do the whole process again.
Second, if you want to setup more than one printer, the method D-Link describes works well but you need to manually adjust the port name that XP suggests when you type in an IP address, because the original printer you set up will be using the XP-suggested port name. I just appended a '2' to the end of it.
And finally, the prickly subject of IP addresses. For the most part, unless you've messed with it, broadband routers default to 192.168.0.x for their domain subnet. A lot of people use DHCP and if you do this with the DP300U it can become a problem because if you reboot anything on the network, the server has the potential to change IP addresses. Doing it with a static IP address seems to work much better. The DP300U ships with a default of 192.168.0.10. For my network at home, I have two PCs and the router, so I only have three devices on the network. Having the print server default to "10" worked straight off even with my router set to DHCP. I'll only get into trouble if I get another 7 PCs all online at once and the DHCP server attempts to re-allocated 192.168.0.10.
And finally, also on the issue of IP addresses - don't change the DP300U to an address range that you don't have set up. If you do, it will vanish off your network and unless you can reconfigure your network to find it, you'll be sending the unit back to D-Link to get the hardware defaults re-instated.
Configuring the print server is pretty simple once it's online. You point your browser to 192.168.0.10 and the DP300U serves up a web page. From there you can configure IP addresses, queues, port names and various other print parameters. When you save any change, the server reboots which takes about 15 seconds and it's then available for use.
We stress-tested the server by having both PCs online at the same time as well as a wireless laptop. We sent a colour photo from each machine to the Inkjet and a few pages of text to both printers, all as quickly as we could from all the computers. The print server lined them all up in the queue and all the documents printed out with no missing pages, and in good order. From this I can assume that in everyday use in a home environment, the D-Link is going to present no real problems. One thing I did notice was the speed of true photo-printing. It's slightly down compared to having the printer directly connected to the PC, but for the sheer convenience of having the printers remotely controlled by a print server, I don't mind the wait.
One thing which is nice is that the inkjet has a sleep mode where it turns off the power to everything but the USB port. When it receives data, it "wakes up" and powers on, prints the task then powers off again. This worked fine when connected directly to the PC but I was unsure how it would behave with the DP300U. As it turns out, it works perfectly. The DP300U sends data to the USB port and the printer works just as it did before. I'm still tussling with how to get the old laser printer to do a similar thing though :-)
