Local and Remote Printing

Several combinations of clients, servers, and printers are possible with Windows 2000, depending on whether the print device is local (receives data directly from the computer) or remote (accessed through a print server), and whether it is networked or directly attached to the computer. A directly attached print device is connected to the computer by a local interface, such as a parallel, serial RS-232/422/IRDA, or USB port. A networked printer is a node on the network: computers send print jobs to it through a network adapter, which might be built-in. A networked printer is also called a network-interface printer.

The following figures show four basic printing configurations. The thin lines represent physical connections, such as network or parallel cables, and the arrows represent the logical print data flow.

Figure 4.2 shows the simplest configuration, a local or stand-alone printer. The print device is plugged into the parallel port of the computer that runs the application. The printer driver and job queue are on that computer, and it sends print data directly to the print device.

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Figure 4.2 Local, Directly Attached Print Device

Figure 4.3 shows a small group of computers sharing a networked print device. This is a peer-to-peer network, where each computer has equal access to the printer, and there is no central control of printing or security. Each computer has its own job queue and cannot see the documents queued on the print device by other computers. If printing halts, the error message does not appear on every client. This is acceptable for small organizations where the users are in frequent contact, but becomes less manageable as traffic increases. Contention among computers submitting documents might cause the print device to time out or reject print jobs.

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