I occasionally do IT support for friends and friends of friends. My last call out was to fix a house that wanted to go entirely wireless – and never have I seen such a collection of Belkin products. All was going well until I had to connect their Canon MP600 to the Belkin Wireless Print Server. Now in theory all you need to do is install Belkin’s proprietary software on each host machine and then it finds the server and then you just install the print drivers.

Once we had set up the print server on the first computer it worked like a charm, however after we added computer 2 and 3 we could not get it all working. After a lot of testing and pinging we found out that Belkin’s built in proprietary software was the problem, because it only allows one machine access to the print server (and hence printer) at a time. It does however have an auto disconnect – so that if a computer has not used the print server for 5 minutes it disconnects.  The problem with this is the when 2 or 3 people are using the printer, they dont want to have to manually disconnect and reconnect, or wait 5 minutes be able to use the printer.

We solved this problem by turning off the print server software and setting up a new connection to the print server (and therefore the printer) by making a new printer connection, and then connecting to a local printer (with plug and play disabled), then creating an IP port and connecting directly to the print server IP. This worked perfectly…

Make sure that if you are doing this that you prevent the Belkin print server software from running everytime you start up by going to Start>Run>msconfig then hit ‘OK’. Select the Startup tab and unselect the services from belkin – then reboot.

If you are thinking about buying a printer you want networked in your home/office – either buy one with an ethernet port or with wireless built in, as 3rd party solutions are often more trouble than they are worth!

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