# Solved: Password Protect Network Printer?



## case649 (Jun 5, 2005)

My roommate (college dorm) bought a printer yesterday, and we've been working with it for the last 12 hours or so to get it networked so I can print to it from my PC. (It's a USB Dell printer connected to his laptop.)

The only difficulty we're having is figuring out how he can share it with me, without sharing it with the whole floor (all on one router).

Right now we've got it set up so that all he has to do is disable his firewall for a few minutes and I can print, and by having the firewall enabled the rest of the time it prevents our floor-mates from even sharing the printer, much less printing to it.

Isn't there a better way to do it? Can't we set it up so that you need a password to connect to it as a shared printer? (We're both running Windows XP, FWIW.)

Thanks in advance.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

HAve him set up a local user account for you on his PC. When you set up the printer for sharing you can specify who can have access to it and if a password is required or not.


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## jameschen (Sep 29, 2005)

Rockn said:


> HAve him set up a local user account for you on his PC. When you set up the printer for sharing you can specify who can have access to it and if a password is required or not.


Can someone give me some step-by-step instruction on how to actually do this? E.g. what steps do I need to do to specify who can have access to my printer?

Also does that mean that I have to create a local user account for everyone who wants to use my printer?

Sorry, I am a bit thick when it comes to all these network stuffs.

Thanks in advance!


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## jmwills (Sep 28, 2005)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/honeycutt_july2.mspx

Since you are behind a router, there's no need to put the user account on the other PC, just create your own internal LAN and only give memebers of the Workgroup access to the printer.


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