Categories: TECHNOLOGY

How to Add a TCP/IP Printer to Your Computer

If you are on a network and have printers with network cards and a static IP address then you might want to think about adding these printers to your available printers that you can print to. To do this you can simple create a TCP/IP port and map the printer to your computer locally and can print to your hearts content. This might sound hard but it’s actually fairly simple and in just a few simple steps you can have a printer mapped via an IP address.

First step is to make sure you have the correct printer IP address, if you don’t know and aren’t provided with it most printers will give you an information page with the IP address on it. You will want to look up your printer and find out how to get this information page; most printers have a button or a sequence of buttons to push to print this page. Once you have the correct IP address you are ready to go.

Go to the Start button in the lower left hand corner of your page and then go to Settings. In the settings you will want to choose the Printers and Faxes option which will open a new window for you. In the left hand panel of this window you will see the add a printer option, click this and it opens the wizard that we will be using to add our printer. In the first window you will want to click next, this will bring up the second step where you will want to choose the option “Local printer attached to this computer” and then make sure that the second option “Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printers” is not selected. Once you have these two options selected correctly click next, in the new window you will want to click on the radio button that says “Create a new port” and in the drop down you will want to select “Standard TCP/IP Port” and then click next.

A new window opens up and you will want to click Next for the first window, now is where the IP is important the computer will ask you to put in the IP address. Your IP should be in a format much like this 192.192.XX.XX, once you have entered your IP address then click next, if it was the right IP you will get a window that has the printer IP listed and the type of network card the printer has and you can click finish.

The last window will be where you find the drivers for your printer, windows has a pretty extensive list of brands and models of printers but doesn’t have every printer ever made so you might have to go download your drivers and manually add them. I am not going to go in-depth into explaining this but once you have the proper driver then you can click next. Then the wizard will take you to another window that might have a couple different versions of the driver for the printer select the one that you want and click next. Then it will ask you if you want to keep the existing driver or replace the driver, I always pick replace the driver incase the old one is out of date.

In the next window you have two options, one you can name the printer anything you want to, there will be a default name in here but you can change it as you see fit. The second option is setting the printer to your default printer; you only want to do this if you will use this printer as your primary printer. The next window will allow you to choose to share the printer or not, since we are working over TCP/IP we don’t want to share the printer with anyone. Lastly you will get the option to print a test page which is a good idea this way you test the connection to the printer and see if you connected properly. The last window you simply have to click finish and it will install your drivers and map your printer.

Now you should be able to print to the printer from any application at any time. Hope this helps you be successful in mapping printers via TCP/IP address.