I have an IBM r40 laptop, and I want to wirelessly connect it to a Brother laser printer. How can I do this?
QUESTION POSED ON: 22 JUL 2004
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Lisa Phifer
I'll guess that you have an IBM Thinkpad R40SMB that includes the embedded Intel Centrino 802.11b Wi-Fi adapter. If you have an R40 without Centrino, then you can purchase any 802.11b Type II PC card adapter to add Wi-Fi capability to your laptop.
The next step is to get your printer networked. You don't say which model of Brother printer you have, and that could impact your options. For example, many Brother printers work with the Brother NC2100-p Ethernet print server, several others work with the NC2200-w 802.11 print server, and one Brother printer (the HL-6050DW) has wireless on-board. To figure out which servers work with your printer, see this chart.
If you can add a wireless print server to your printer, then you may be able to connect your Thinkpad directly to the printer in ad hoc peer-to-peer mode. Otherwise, you'll need an 802.11b wireless router to create an infrastructure mode WLAN. In that case, you'd plug the Ethernet print server into a switch port on the router; your Thinkpad will communicate with the print server through the router.
If you have another desktop PC at home, you can use that PC as a print server instead of purchasing a server specifically for your Brother. To do that, you'd connect the Brother to the desktop PC, then connect the desktop PC to your Thinkpad, in either ad hoc or infrastructure mode as described above. Then use Windows printer sharing to make the Brother accessible to your Thinkpad as \\DESKTOP\BROTHER.
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