Printer sharing info

[osca]

Can anybody tell me how i can run two printers on the same computer. I have a real good photo printer and an old plain printer for simple tasks and need to have the option of which one i use.

[Steve R Jones]

You can get a simple A/B switch. These "can" caused problems but work most of the time.

Or you can add a second parallel port card. This is a bit harder to do.

[Fingers]

I'm assuming that you are running Windows 9.x, but I believe it would be the same in NT/W2K.

You have a couple of options;

1) Buy a printer switch box. You'll have to turn the switch everytime you change printers and also select the proper printer from the "print menu" every time before you start a print job. There may also be automatic switch boxes available, but I'm not sure about that.

2) Install a PCI parallel card in a free PCI slot to give you a second printer port. You'll still have to select the correct printer from your "print menu", but you can actually use both printers simultaniously if you want to.

3) If one of your printers is USB capable, just connect one of them to the regular parallel port, and hook the other one up to USB.


I currently have one of my own personal computers configured like #2, but our business computer uses a Epson dot-matrix on the parallel port for printing invoices and and a USB Lexmark for color printing (#3).

[osca]

Thank you for the reply, I will get myself a pci card and slip that in and see how it goes