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printing wirelessly in dorm room

J

javadan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 9, 2009
5
0
I will be off to college this fall and want to set up my macbook to print to an as yet unpurchased MFC wirelessly I have talked to school IT people and my dorm is a hard wired acces point only and if I try to use an airport as a hub it will screw up the connection. any way I want to maybe use a bluetooth dongle setup or something like that to print in the dorm. Anyone do this.. is this the wrong approach is it really slow, (4mbit vs usb 2.0 420mbit) or is the printer pipeline unable to process large data packets anyway... I have talked to several people (apple tech, Hp tech, dorm tech) and three answers.
Thanks
Javadan
 
So long as the printer supports Bluetooth, you can use your internal Bluetooth card to print to it.
 
so just having a bluetooth dongle plugged into the usb port of a printer wpnt do the trick
javadan
 
It is more than likely that you will be able to print to your MFC via wifi. Most of those printers are able to connect directly as what's called an ad-hoc connection which should not affect your school's network in any way - this would be totally isolated. There will be more in the manual regarding this - What model are you looking at in particular? Perhaps something can be determined prior.
 
Is there any printer speed issues with blooootooth printing vs usb cabled, or is the available throughput of the printer so small that the speed difference is negligable..?
Javadan
 
javadan said:
Is there any printer speed issues with blooootooth printing vs usb cabled, or is the available throughput of the printer so small that the speed difference is negligable..?
Javadan
Click to expand...

You should be just fine to print over Bluetooth. 4Mbps is plenty for printing needs. Most documents are <1MB in size and many high resolution digital camera images aren't larger than 6-8 MB if they're JPEG or another compressed format.
 
Who cares how fast your connection to your printer is? How big are your print files? 200kb to 1mb? If your printer gets the information in 10 msec or 20 msec it will still take 2 minutes to print.

People just get too worked up about things sometimes.
 
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