If you have a SOHO network with PCs running on Windows XP, you can share one printer by all PCs in the network, without any additional software or hardware. The following are steps to configure the your PCs to reach this goal.

Set up a SOHO network environment

The Network Setup Wizard includes links to detailed advice about configuring your network, including help on designing a network layout to suit your SOHO office. First of all, you need to configure your PCs to be networked.

• Click My Computer
• Click Network Place

• Click Set up a home or small office network – now you are get into the Network Setup Wizard
• Click Next a couple of times
• When you get to the page of Select a connection method, click “This computer connects to the Internet through another computer on my network or through a residential gateway.” Or “Other”. Then click Next.
• If you clicked “Other” in the previous step, you need to select the proper Internet connection again in this page. Otherwise, you will see the next page:
• “Give this computer a description and a name”. You may give any description such as “my computer in office 1”, and any name such as “my-computer”. Then click Next.
• In this page, you need to give a name to the whole network, such as “my-office”. Then click Next.
• Now, you are ready to finish the Set up Wizard. You need to restart the computer to see the settings you just entered taking effects.

You may repeat the above steps to bring all computers in the SOHO NET to the network. After bring all PCs onto the network, you can set up shared resource such as printer and document folders.

Sharing a printer

You need to follow normal steps to install a printer on one computer first. After you installed your printer on the computer, you could use it from other computers, including your laptop computer, sitting on the patio, connecting to the network with a wireless NIC. Before your could do that, I had to share the printer.

To share the printer, firstly your opened the Printers and Faxes folder on the computer that was connected to your printer.

To open the Printers and Faxes folder

• Click Start and then click Control Panel.
• Click Printers and Other Hardware, and then click Printers and Faxes.
• In the Printers and Faxes folder, clicked the printer's icon and, in the tasks pane, clicked Share This Printer.
• Or Opened the printer's Properties dialog box, and clicked on the Sharing tab.

Clicked Share Name, and then clicked OK.

After these steps, the printer should be immediately available for other computers to use. Now that you had a network printer, you are ready to connect to it and print from other computers on the network.

The following steps tell you how to connect to the shared printer by any PC,

• Opened Control Panel, and clicked Printers and Other Hardware.
• Clicked Add a Printer.
• Instead of adding a local printer, though, clicked Printer Connection and then browsed the network for the printer.

The whole process took less than a minute before you could print to the network printer as though it was connected to the computer.

If you cannot find the printer by using the 'browse' option as described above, you can find the location directly by using this method. Type \\(computername)\(printername) into the 'network path' or 'connect to this printer' box. Where 'computername' is the name of the system attached to the printer (find this by right clicking on 'my computer,' selecting 'properties' then the 'computer name' tab) and 'printername' is the name you gave the printer when you shared it.

For example, if your printer was 'deskjet' and the computer name with the printer directly connected was 'mycomputer,' type \\mycomputer\deskjet into the search field.