Wireless Printer for Laptop Cart

[scottpowers82]

Happy Monday Everyone,

 

I’m trying to get some quotes for some wireless printers to be used on our laptop carts. We currently have two carts setup with old Linksys WRT54G routers running DD-WRT to enable a wireless bridge for a printer (that only has a LAN port) that sits on the cart. However, now that many printers come with wireless built in, I was hoping to find a good wireless printer that can handle many students trying to print to it at once. I have seen some cheaper desktop printers that have trouble when more than five clients try to print to it and need to find something that can handle up to 30 kids trying to print without choking. Laserjets would be preferred, but welcome all suggestions.

 

What is everyone out there using for a print solution on your wireless laptop carts?

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions...

[Joe-WLS]

H

 

What is everyone out there using for a print solution on your wireless laptop carts?

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions...

 

We currently just use the network printer from the laptops. Each laptop is connected to the network and can print through that. We've not really had any reason to change this - Seems to work well enough.

[Michael]

Wireless printers are a little pointless for education or businesses in my view. You're always going to needs mains power, so it has to be positioned near a wall at the very least.

 

The recommended approach is to setup a printer via an Ethernet connection, configure a static IP, then setup/share the printer on your server. Deploy the printer using GPO or GPP and that's it.

 

When users print from a notebook or netbook for example, the job is sent wirelessly to your server (through existing wireless access points), then through Ethernet to your printer.

 

I've setup quite a few wireless printers in a workgroup or home environment, but it's still considerably more fiddly than USB or Ethernet. I've even had people ask me to make printers wireless and it's positioned less than 30cm away from their PC