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12 Great Do-It-Yourself PC Projects

How to customize Vista, streamline your network, create an entertainment hub, and do much more--quickly and easily.

Jon L. Jacobi, Richard Morochove, Scott Spanbauer, Lincoln Spector, Mark Sullivan, and Becky Waring

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Unwire Your Printer

Wireless printer setup. Click to view full-size image.Making your printer wireless means never having to worry about cables or Windows printer sharing. Best of all, you can add a Wi-Fi print server to the printer you already have.

For this project, we recommend using either the D-Link DPR-1260 ($100) or the Linksys WPSM54G ($120) print server. Both models support scanning and printing on multifunction machines; the D-Link has four USB ports and the Linksys one. To start, make sure print drivers are installed on all the networked PCs. Then plug your printer into the print server, connect the server to your router via ethernet, and power the devices up.

Next, set up the print server from your PC. The Linksys has a superb CD-based wizard that leads you through the entire process, from physical connections to Wi-Fi encryption setup. By contrast, the D-Link has a Web utility that requires you to click around to set up the Wi-Fi connection and add the printer to your computer. Once setup is done, you can disconnect ethernet and restart the server, which will now connect wirelessly.

Finally, set up additional systems by running the computer setup wizard on each of them. If you have any Mac or Linux machines on your network, use the print server's Web utilities to define its static IP address and enable IP printing.

Becky Waring

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