The Dell 1250c Printer in a domestic network

I couldn't find anything about this so I had to figure it out myself.

Hopefully it will help someone else.

We have a couple of Buffalo NAS drives which can support printers.

I used to have an HP Inkjet printer attached to one of them but someone else needed that and I got a Dell 1250c Colour Laser Printer from Tesco for £50.

It seemed to me that if I got 3 times as long from it as we had from the HP before it needed new supplies I would be ahead.

However there was the matter of getting it to work over USB from a networked NAS drive.

This was much easier than I feared. It came with a disk of stuff (drivers etc) which I installed on my XP  Laptop.

That didn't do much other than install various bits of monitoring software which couldn't find a printer.

I then tried a manual printer add (using "have disk"picking the Dell inf file at the critical moment from the CD) and using a new port (local IP port created using the IP address of the printer and the print queue \lp for the Buffalo).

To my amazement it worked fine.

I followed the same manual add for the Windows 7 Desktop.

To my further amazement Dell have a driver DMG for Mac OSX which worked with my 10.4 Macbook.

I installed that then added a Network printer in "Print and Fax" as with the XP machine. Once again it "just worked".

I'm not sure who deserves prizes although one to Dell for doing a Mac driver when they make PCs is due.

If there are more detailed questions I'll do a follow up.

Best of luck !