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Sharing a printer is much more traumatic than sharing a hard drive. When you share a hard drive, other network users access your files from time to time. When they do, you hear your drive click a few times, and your computer may hesitate for a half-second or so. The interruptions caused by other users accessing your drive are sometimes noticeable but rarely annoying.

When you share a printer, you get to see Murphy’s Law in action: Your co-worker down the hall is liable to send a 140-page report to your printer just moments before you try to print a 1-page memo that has to be on the boss’s desk in two minutes. The printer may run out of paper — or worse, jam — during someone else’s print job — and you’re expected to attend to the problem.

Although these interruptions can be annoying, sharing your printer makes a lot of sense in some situations. If you have the only decent printer in your office or workgroup, everyone will bug you to let them use it anyway. You may as well share the printer on the network. At least this way, they won’t line up at your door to ask you to print their documents for them.

To share a printer, follow these steps:

1 Open the Control Panel.Windows 10, 8.1, and 8: Press the Windows key, type Control, and then click the Control Panel icon.Windows 7: Choose Start ⇒ Control Panel.

2 Click Devices and Printers.

3 Right-click the printer that you want to share and choose Printer Properties.The Properties dialog box for the printer appears.

4 Click the Sharing tab.The Sharing tab appears, as shown in Figure 4-4. Notice that the options for sharing the printer are disabled.

5 Select the Share This Printer option.

6 (Optional) Change the share name if you don’t like the name suggested by Windows.Because other computers will use the share name to identify the shared printer, pick a descriptive name.

7 Click OK.You return to the Printers folder. The icon for the printer is modified to indicate that it has been shared.

FIGURE 4-4: Sharing a printer.

To take your shared printer off the network so that other network users can’t access it, follow Steps 1–4 in the preceding set of steps. Deselect the Share This Printer check box and then click OK.