Summary: Run, while you can!!
Comment: The only thing worse than this print server was DLink's support. Bottom line it would print nothing but gibberish. The first level guy has no idea. The second level guy actually admits that he knows nothing about the device and that I have more documentation than he does because I have the manual that came with the device. Wow! They don't even let there employee's download the electronic documentation from the web. Might just be a defective device, might have been some port setting that the second level support department didn't know about. I don't know. What I know is that the second level support represntitive didn't have the answers so he asked for my name and phone number and let me know that a senior technician would call me back. ETA 48 to 72 Hours.
Long story short returned the Dlink and picked up a Hawking Technologies, PN7127P Print Server for the same price....worked out of the box.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works great once you get it to work
Comment: The challenge was to get this to work in the first place. The installation seemed straightforward, but I couldn't get it work on my laser printer (it would "wake up" and the data light would flash, but then nothing would print). I was able to get it to work with my inkjet from my Win98 desktop, but not from my Win2K laptop. I was later able to get it to work from my laptop by switching to LPR protocol, but then this stopped working the next day. When I checked the D-Link support website, it said that the print server doesn't support GDI printers and listed just about every current HP Deskjet model (including mine) as unsupported (what a relevation, even though I know it's not correct).
After several frustrating days, I was about to pack it up and return it, but decided to give it one last try. I deleted the printers from my PCs and started over. Lo and behold, it worked this time with the laser printer on both my desktop and laptop PCs. And it has worked flawlessly since then.
A couple of things should be noted: 1) Advanced printer features such as two-sided printing (and probably options to pick print quality/stock) on my HP inkjet are not supported, so use the print server for standard printing only. I have it hooked up to my laser printer, which is used for ordinary and high-volume print jobs. Options such as print orientation, number of pages per sheet, number of print copies are supported however. 2) The installation instructions do a disservice by telling users to change the IP address of their network in order to have it encompass the IP address of the print server. Instead, they should tell you to change the print server's address to make it fall within the range of your existing network. In the configuration program, I simply changed the IP address setting from Manual to DHCP and it was able to assign an acceptable address for the server.
If you have trouble with the initial installation, don't give up right away. Once you get it working, it is well worth the effort. It is so cool to be able to bring home a laptop from work and to be able to use a printer simply by plugging in the Ethernet cable (which I have to do anyway for work), and not have to hassle with a switch box or Windows printer sharing (which requires leaving the host PC on).
Customer Rating:
Summary: good, economical print server
Comment: In summary, this is a good, economical print server for wired home network. With this print server, you can print it from any computer on your home network... One thing to note, your print server needs to be connected to a switch or hub... This one is not a wireless print server :)
I wanted to off-load print server duty from one computer of my home network of 3 computers. I did not like the fact that my Windows 98 machine has to be up all the time if I want to print from other computers... Not a good idea, since Windows 98 does not perform well when it is up for long time... It needs some periodical reboot to perform well. This print server works good. You just plug into the parallel port on one end, and your home network via built-in RJ-45 port....
Setting up... was fairly straight forward. One thing to note is that your print server works only if it is within the same IP address range.. i.e. if you have Linksys switch, which has local IP address between 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255... you must statically set your print server any IP within the LInksys range... (NOTE: D-Link uses 192.168.0.1 as its standard IP address, and this does not work with Linksys...). So.. Just make sure that you are within the same IP address range.
Using Print server: You need to install driver for Windows 98/ME.. however, for Windows 2000 and XP only needs to know the IP address of the print server and the port name... It is fairly straight forward to set your computer with the print server.
Overall, I am quite satisfied with this product... It was one of the most economical print server... For those who doesn't need wireless print server.. I would recommend this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well designed and easy to install and configure
Comment: Through no fault of this excellent product I was only able to use it for a week - I inherited an old Lexmark Z11 inkjet that I wanted to share between two laptops in my corporate apartment, but wound up replacing the Lexmark with an USB-only printer.
What makes this such an excellent product is the ease of installation and the fact that it flawlessly works. Installing it consisted of attaching the device directly to the printer's parallel interface, connecting an Ethernet cable to the RJ-45 port on the other side of the print server, running the CD ROM installation and being able to immediately print to a shared printer.
One of the things I most like is the installation and configuration utility that ships with this device. You get an administration program (you can also access and administer the print server through a browser or through a telnet session), and an "add printer" wizard that makes configuring other computers on your network easy. In fact, the "add printer" wizard is a quantum improvement over D-Link's earlier Pocket Print Server products - I own an older model and set-up and configuration was somewhat confusing, which is no longer the case with their newer software. I also link the small power supply, which takes up little space in a power strip or on an UPS.
Overall, this is a high quality product that has a plethora of features (it supports Windows networking, AppleTalk and TCP/IP, and it can be managed via browser of by using TCP/IP telnet), and can be installed and configured by a novice.