Ok, I bought the wife a laptop that has built in wireless G capability. Bought a Linksys wireless G router (WRT54G). Everything is working perfectly, but there's one hitch. If she needs to print something or access her 40GB external hard drive she has to shut down, move the laptop into the computer room, connect a USB cable to the hub (printer/drive) and restart.
Is there a wireless system or device that'll take care of this?

wireless printserver or a lan printerserver
does not work with all printers, especially photo printers
which need computer to process the colors

Call Linksys and ask them the best thing to use. Their tech sapport is ussually fantastic.

Jon

You may have to change your printer properties to Share Printer and set up a shared network between the Laptop and the Computer the printer is hooked up to.
I work off my Laptop (wireless) and share the printer hooked up to my main computer.
My wireless router has a shared Serial Printer port that both computers can use but I have had bad luck using it the pages come out of the printer with the last sentence cut off so I set it up like I described above.

Scott

On a local LAN, you can have both File (hard drive) and Printer sharing. It is a little complicated to setup, but you can do it.

Get the book Networking for Dummies. It really helped me.

Iggy,

Clay is right. The best way for her to access the devices would be to setup them up on another PC in the computer room. Then you would need to share the devices off the PC. She would be able to access them off of the laptop.

I have a shared printer on a hardwired PC.

My wireless laptops DO print to that printer (shared over the network) but it is slow, tedious, and can chop the print job off halfway through.

I have Compaq and HP laptops using 54g and 802.11b cards to the same Linksys 54g router you are using.

Haven't found a good solution yet, other than to send graphics heavy files to the hardwired PC and print directly from it.

Word and text documents print okay off the wireless laptops...

Any advice here would be good.

(oh, and I found a hack to bump up the signal strength level lf the Linksys 54g router if you have some "fringe" areas in your house that don't get good signal - but it can fry the router if it is not well ventilated)

I decided to try and set the desktop unit to share the printer and files.
Yesterday I picked up a copy of Wireless Networking for Dummies. In it there's a whole section on print and file sharing. I read it, reread it, I believe I did everything correct but I just can't get a test page to print. Laptop seems to stall each time I try. But I was able to access files on the desktop unit from the laptop so I know I'm close.

mcollinstn,
signal strength doesn't seem to be a problem. The farthest distance is only 40'. Linksys has a signal booster I could buy if necessary. Either that or I was thinking of moving the router to a more central point in the house if it became an issue.

I'm sure Linksys has good tech support. I called them the day after Christmas for help in getting both computers to access our email server. After an hour the tech couldn't get it to work, suggested I return the wireless unit to the store for exchange. One last effort, I called my ISP support and with one minor change in our mail settings I was back in business.

Thanks guys.

WE GOT IT!!!!!

You wouldn't believe what was wrong.
We had the printer properties set to display a document preview prior to printing. As soon as we disabled that option it took off and ran a test page.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

Glad to hear it. Now you can officialy think of yourself as a computer geek and networking guru.