Use your BT Home Hub – Use it as a print server – Windows XP guide

3 December 2006 , ,

This article was written for the BT Home Hub V1 only and has not been tested on any other versions.

Have you ever wondered what that USB port on your BT Home Hub was for? Well it turns out that you can use it to connect a printer to and therefore turning you BT Home Hub into a print server.

For some reason BT don’t seem to share this information easily, I don’t know why though as personally I think it’s another selling point for them. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want to support it.

To set this up, follow the below (Windows Vista users, click here):

  1. Connect your printer to the USB port on the BT Home Hub
  2. Start the Add New Printer Wizard
  3. Select to Add a local printer and make sure that the automatically detect option is unticked
  4. Click Next
  5. Select create a new port and select Standard TCP/IP port from the list
  6. Click Next
  7. Click Next
  8. Enter 192.168.1.253 in the printer name field and the port name will automatically be completed
  9. Click Next
  10. Select Custom and click the settings button
  11. Select LPR
  12. Select LPR Byte Counting Enabled
  13. Enter the Queue Name as LPT1
  14. Click OK
  15. Click Next
  16. Click Finish
  17. Either select your printer from the list or insert the printer driver CD and click have disk
  18. Click Next
  19. Enter your printer name and select if you want it to be your default printer
  20. Click Next
  21. Select if you want to share your printer
  22. Click Next
  23. Print a Test Page
  24. Click Next

That’s it, you should now be able to print to a USB printer connected to your BT Home Hub.

We’ve received mixed feedback from visitors about using the BT Home Hub as a print server. It works great for some and then also others report that it only prints once until the printer is unplugged and then reconnected to the hub. We believe this problem is main found where the printer required bi-directional communication (i.e. printer status etc) and the BT Home Hub doesn’t seem to handle it well. If you are able to turn printer status checks etc off, it may be worth trying that.

Unfortunately we no longer have access to a BT Home Hub to try and figure out the true cause of these problems and therefore are unable to offer any support or solutions.

However, we hope you have found this article useful.

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