I recently went from being a PC only household to one with multiple PC’s and one MacBook Pro. I have a HP Inkjet All in one connected over USB to one Windows 7 system. I know I can share the printing part with the MBP but can I share the scanning function?
All the USB sharing over IP programs I find seem to be PC only.
Not as far as I know. I know you can’t share a scanner over a network in an all-Mac network, and unless there’s some third-party software I don’t know about, I assume you also couldn’t do it over a Windows network. Of course, you can always just bring the laptop to the scanner and plug it in directly when you need to, but I imagine that’s inconvenient. There’s no reason you can’t install the right drivers on the Mac and use it that way, though.
There are a few 3rd party USB device sharing options for the PC that are not too expensive. I was hoping that there would be one that also had a OS X client. I am very impressed by my new system and if I could afford it I’d replace my main desktop with an OS X system but that is far our of my budget.
The way I would do it (in an all PC environment) would be to scan the images into the computer the scanner is plugged into and then push/pull them across the network to the computer I want them on.
I have no idea how well Macs and PCs talk to each other for doing that though.
This is probably not what you had in mind, but before you spend a dime on any software or hardware dongles look online for a deal on an all-in-one printer/scanner that has a built-in Ethernet port. Would make things pretty cut & dry. TigerDirect.com or even WalMart.com might very well have great deals this time of year…
I did consider that but I haven’t seen a low cost one with ethernet.
That’s a good possibility
This may do the trick.
There may be cheaper USB print servers out there but i’m too lazy to look. Basically turns the printer into a network device, so I’m assuming it would be cross platform (just have to install the appropriate drivers on each pc).