I was reading on10 a few days ago and came across a brilliant post. Xerox have created a driver which plugs straight into Windows, and searches for printers close to your physical location.
I was reading on10 a few days ago and came across a brilliant post. Xerox have created a driver which plugs straight into Windows, and searches for printers close to your physical location.
For the life of me, I can't work out how it does it, but it does it well. I tried it yesterday in a variety of different places - London's wireless "cloud", Starbucks (which has a printer open for use), our campus library and even in the halls of residence I left a few weeks ago - probably ending up confusing at least one of the conference guests there when he found something printed out. It works brilliantly, and an essential tool for students who move around and take their laptops with them.
As Sarah wrote, you can search using a wifi hotspot, use it over at your friends house, use it on your work corporate network, anything like that. (If anyone actually knows how this works, please leave a comment - I'm very intrigued).
Not only is this a free tool to download, but it also works on non-Xerox printers. Considering a lot of people nowadays work on the train, in a coffee shop, on the aeroplane, anywhere except the office, this makes printing much easier to do, without the hassle of speaking to IT (who are frankly probably useless anyway) or connecting wires up and configuring drivers.
The ability to keep locations stored is another key part of this printing tool. If you visit the same place more than one, you can save locations and the printers it finds attaches itself to that place; when you fire up your laptop again, your location can be set and it'll see that printer without having to search for it again.
It's keen to stress a couple of things though. The "driver" may as well just be "software"; yes it installs an extra printer into your Control Panel, but that is fairly useless to the user. Instead of printing to your ordinary printer, which no doubt you already have in your Printer and Faxes applet, you print to the "Xerox Mobile Express Driver" and it'll open another window and search for printers near to you.
You can download this tool freefrom Download.com - you do have to be connected to the Internet as it installs, as the setup program you download isn't the actual driver.
