How To Connect Your Printer To Your Network

I'm Adria and today I'm going to show you how to network your printer so everyone can print hassle-free I'd like to thank Dell for providing this printer for the video demo now while you may have a printer on your desk that just doesn't scale as your company begins to grow before we get started let's make sure you have everything you need to follow along I call this my pre-flight checklist a printer that has networking capabilities a computer two Ethernet cables and a network for today's video the printer we'll set up is the Dell 21:55 CDN which is a multi-function laser printer the abbreviation for device the prince stands makes copies and faxes is a multifunction printer or MFP but wait there's more it's also known as an all-in-one or an A i/o next we'll need a computer to set up the printer with the laptop I'm working on today is the Dell Vostro V 130 and it's running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit operating system let's talk Ethernet cables an Ethernet cable connects your device such as a laptop or a printer to your network in most cases this cable will be blue yellow grey or black this is also known as a patch-through cable or a straight-through cable it kind of looks like a big phone jack networks can be simple or complex it can be two computers sharing a printer and internet connection it can be a large-scale network complete with a closet rack-mounted servers patch panels a t1 line and multiple servers but for today we're going to use a simple example with one router one computer one printer and an internet connection now let's get started with setting things up there going to be three major steps in completing this the first will be the physical setup where we will actually connect the devices to each other the second will be the network setup which will include configuring the printer to have an IP address and the last step will be setting up the software on the computer so that it can communicate to the printer okay so with all these items the first thing we want to do is the physical setup now this printer i've already unboxed make sure you do that you need to remove all the tapes you need activate the toner set your time zone date things like that so I'm already working with that here the next thing we're going to do is go ahead and connect the printer to the network we're going to use one of the Ethernet cables I may use the blue one so I'm going to go around to the back of the printer and I'm plugging that in and then on the back of your networking device or your switch you're going to go ahead and plug this into one of the data ports all right next we need to go ahead and connect the laptop or computer I'll be using Ethernet cable as well now this printer model supports three different types of connectivity we're doing a hard wired Ethernet connection today but it also supports a direct connection via USB and you can also do Wireless but that's an optional feature so you have to get the add-on card but for now reusing Ethernet let's go ahead and get that connected to the back of the router / switch great boom so when it comes to computer networks you have devices that are connected through cables and they talk to each other they exchange information they print people can view files and folders those sorts of things let's talk about networks because that's important part of this video so when you go ahead and configure a device with a manual address you need three items you need the IP address the subnet mask and the gateway a typical network has an IP range of 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.2 55 so we're going to go ahead and get that configured on the front of the panel first we'll go to menu then we're going to go ahead and navigate down to system hit the ok button then we will go down to the admin menu and then we're going to go to network in here we're going to go ahead and choose tcp/ip so we'll go down one and then we're going to choose ipv4 we actually need to do two things in here one is tell the printer that we manually want to set the IP address we see right now it says auto IP and that's pretty common with printers once we tell the printer we want to set the IP address manually we will then go ahead and do so so first we'll start here and get IP address and we're going to change this to panel meaning that we will input the new IP address via the panel it's going to notify us that the system will not take effect until we restart the printer so we'll go back and then we go down to IP address hit OK and we're going to go ahead and enter in the address 192.168.1.1 eed to check the subnet mask 255 255 255 0 and we'll go ahead and change the gateway address so that will be 192.168.1.1 we will now restart the printer for them to take effect and to check the IP address we can go back into the menu but we also can print a report so we're going to go to menu can go to system we're going to report list and we'll go to system settings and you'll see it will actually print that report for us and we can see here that the IP address has been set under the network configuration now we're at the last step of setting up a network printer we've gone ahead and connected all the devices we've manually configured an IP address for this printer and talked about networking now it's time to put the software on the laptop so it can print to the printer now when you install software for a printer you usually have two options one is to install the drivers and the other is to install the software the software can do a variety of things from scanning faxing and even monitoring toner a lot of different options there if this is your first time adding a printer to your network go ahead and select the first item which is the guided setup they'll take you step-by-step through everything we're going to go ahead and choose the software installation which will install the drivers and the printer software next we'll choose the network installation we'll choose our model number which is the CDN and a local installation for the print drivers we'll go ahead and acknowledge that Windows 7 prompt and I may go ahead and rename the printer to something a little bit more friendly I'll go ahead and choose to install all of the software and then we're done so the great thing about having the software installed is that you can do a lot of remote monitoring of the printers health right from your desktop ok we made sure we had everything we needed we went ahead and connected all the devices we can figure it our network we installed the software so now it's time to test what we're going to do is go into the control panel and then really look at Devices and Printers and from there we're going to generate a test page to make sure that our laptop can print to the printer let's go ahead and do that your printer tests page will go to the Start menu we'll click Devices and Printers we'll go ahead and double-click the Dell 21:55 CDN go to printer then to properties and click to print a test page I have a test page do you hopefully your setup went fine if it didn't leave a question down below let me know what type of printer you had and I can certainly help you along after checking out this printer I would say that the del 21:55 CDN is a great value it's a multifunction color laser printer so it scans faxes prints pretty much does everything except make your dinner well that wraps up the tutorial on how to connect your printer to the network stay tuned for videos 2 & 3 where I will show you how to scan from a printer to Evernote as well as I'll compare three laser printers for the office I also want to tell you about this great program that Dell has called the trade end program basically you can go ahead and send in your older laser printer and Dell will give you up to 50% off the purchase of a new printer just like this one as always if you like this video please subscribe for more great videos leave a comment down below and like my video thanks everybody you

Channel: Adria Richards

Views: 1,073,926

Keywords: howto, printer, network, network printer, adriarichards, dell, dell laptop, linksys router, wireless printing, Computer Network, aio, multifunction, Software Tutorial, adria richards, how to video, technology training, small business printer, color laser printer, office printer, Office Space

Id: _1MVKHr4nps

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2012