Robots are grand things, as such I've devoted a lot of my life to them.
Robots are grand things, as such I've devoted a lot of my life to them.
Member since:11.12.2005
Reviews:39
Members who trust:6
I bought one of these a while ago and have been quite impressed overall. I must agree with the lady reviewer that this device is very useful and also quite easy to use.
It does accept two printers via USB and it can connect to your network via either wireless or wired networking. It supports WEP security on your network and seems to have goos signal strength attached to it. As you would expect from Belkin the device is well made and the manual makes a lot of sense.
Be aware however that not all printers are supported by the system, I had some trouble getting firmware updates to allow for my Laser printer to work on it - however Belkin have provided these on their website.
The device asks that you have the printer drivers already installed on your PC when you install the Belkin software, this isn't like normal print server at all. Normally one would install the printers over the network and work from their. Thankfully however you can usually skip moving the printer around the house to install it on each PC if you just ignore the test settings for it. Then the Belkin drivers work well.
Given the way this print server works it is not directly compatible with either Linux or Macs. For Macs the solution is simple, just search online for some drivers and thou shalt receive. Im using a print protocol called GiMP, this claims to work under Linux variants as well, though I haven't tested this.
Overall the device is good, it connects well to wireless networks and can use the wired connection equally as well. It is able to cope printing large documents (ie large in memory usage) and never seems to crash on me. As I've said its connected to my laser printer and has managed to support six students printing a lot of large documents out at once.
As print servers for home / small office go, this one is excellent for the task, it is easy to setup and needs almost no maintenance. Just make sure that your printer is compatible with it before you buy though.
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