Adding a New Printer

How you go about adding a new printer depends on how you'll be connecting to it:

• If your printer is connected directly to your computer with a USB, parallel, or serial printer cable, you are installing a local printer. Installing a local printer is covered in the next section.
• If you want to use a printer that's shared by another computer on your network, you still need to set up a printer icon on your own computer. This is called installing a network printer.
• A printer that's physically connected to the network wiring itself and not cabled to another computer is called a "local printer on a network port," just to make things confusing. However, if you have a network-attached printer, try the standard Add Printer procedure we describe in the next section. Windows 7 is pretty smart about finding and using networked printers.