Our Canon i550 printer has been sitting unused for ages due to difficulties in networking it and sharing it through our heterogeneous network, its age, etc.

I took a chance and got a $25 USB to Ethernet print server to try to network the printer directly. (It's actually also a USB networking hub so you could in principle network an external USB hard drive (but I haven't tried that myself) and maybe other USB devices.)

I wanted to see how far I could go without using the included software.

J's Macbook Pro found it trivially and it worked fine.

My Win7 Pro box did its usual fumbling about without finding any printer attached to it. I found the IP address by logging into my router that serves up DHCP addresses and made some progress, but Winders still couldn't print properly to it. The included software didn't help.

Be sure to follow JMH's instructions for installing it with Winders.

http://www.amazon.co...ode=&nodeID=&tag=

For me, the key was to tell it to use LPR rather than RAW, and do so after the print queue was empty.

HTH.

Cheers,
Scott.