I have 7 PCs in my house a one Mac. I also have 3 printers in the house – a laser, a color laser, and a photo printer. In the past, I would hook all the printers up to one computer in the network and then share the printer so that the other computers could print to it. This seemed to work well, but I had to leave the computer with the printer attached to it ON all the time so that others could print.

Recently, this “main” computer had a harddrive fail. As I was tinkering with it and rebuilding the system, no one could print! Yes, I could have manually plugged the printer to the machine trying to print and then installed the drivers, etc. etc., but what a huge hassle. What I needed was a way for the printers to stand on their own. This is when I came across this little gem.

The Linksys PSUS4 has a print server for a USB printer, but it also has a 4 port switch. This is a very unusual combination. With the extra ports, I can plug in my networked printers and they hang a few cat 5′s off of it for a direct connection to laptops of visitors, etc. I installed this in about 10 minutes and with almost no setup i was ready to go.

It’s been about 3 weeks now and this unit has performed flawlessly. I have put the former “main” computer into a powersave mode now so that it shuts down if no one is using it after a few hours. In the past, that meant no one could print. No worries now!

You see, main computer is a pretty hairy setup. It’s got a large power suppy and a wicked GTX graphics card. It is under my desk and I can feel the heat coming up off of the computer. I am very happy now that I have this little print server. Highly recommended for a shared printer setup.