How to add a printer to Windows Home Server

This post is more of a reminder for myself. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how I did this before and I thought I’d document it for other people. My Samsung ML-2010 crapped out… the Error is stuck continuously on. Adding new toner didn’t solve the problem and there isn’t any paper jam that I can find. So, I guess I’ll just chalk it up to a crappy Samsung product that didn’t even outlast the starter cartridge. I ended up buying a refurbished Brother printer from Fry’s for $50 AR. Maybe I should have bought an HP instead. In any case, the Brother HL-2040 is my new printer attached to my network via my Windows Home Server.

These are the steps that I followed when installing the printer:

1. Install the printer driver on the Windows Home Server. I still have an optical drive and monitor hooked up to my WHS. Others with a pre-built home server will probably need to use remote desktop connection and a networked optical drive to do the driver install.
2. Hook everything up to the server according to instructions and make sure that the test page can be printed.
3. On the client computer, install the printer drivers as well (this step may be optional, but it worked for me).
4. On the client, click Start | Run and enter the path to the server: \\servername. Click OK to browse resources on the server.
5. Right-click the network printer and choose “Connect”. The printer will be installed.

This will install the printer on the proper port on the client. I had already installed the drivers on the client PC, but that may not be necessary with this method.

How low can you go? (Power that is)

I’ve always been interested in helping to save the environment. I know my gadget purchases aren’t necessarily good for the environment. At least now Costco is recycling many technology items for free. But I’ve always been interested in how low you can go in power consumption. My Windows Home Server is running on a Via C3 at 1.3GHz that pulls about 39W idle out of the wall outlet, and that’s with two HDDs. The Everex gPC being sold at Walmart for $199 uses the carbon-neutral C7-D processor running at 1.5GHz. What’s really intriguing to me is that the gOS that it runs might as well be called the Google OS in that the apps that are installed are really links to

1. Firefox
2. Google Mail
3. Google News
4. Google Calendar
5. Google Maps
6. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
7. Google Product Search
8. Blogger
9. YouTube
10. Facebook
11. Faqly
12. Meebo
13. Rythmbox
14. Skype
15. Wikipedia
16. Xine

as described in this blog entry which has an interview with David Liu, the founder of gOS. The beauty of having all the applications and even data in the Google cloud is that you may be able to get away without a hard drive in the system, booting off flash and storing all data either on the Internet or on a network share in the home, like a Windows Home Server.

So the purpose of this blog entry is to state that, time and money allowing, I will see how low a power PC I can construct that can perform the functions of a typical PC. My initial plans are

1. Try the gOS, which is a Ubuntu derivative, on one of my regular machines, just to see how well it works. Unfortunately, the torrent download is taking forever. I’ve only been able to download less than 1MB out of the 728MB over the past hour or so.
2. Buy a developer board from ClubIT that has the same motherboard as the Everex PC. Build it up with a 3.5″ HDD, then with a 2.5″ HDD, and then with either a CF card or a USB flash drive as the boot drive. Problem for the latter will be to figure out how to successfully boot off a USB drive or to hook up a CF card to the PATA interface.
3. Get the gOS to be able to save files to my Windows Home Server as a network share. This way I can use the big hard drives on my WHS in place of a native hard drive or the limited storage available from Google.

This may take a while to work through but I’ll try to blog my progress.