Our printer died. It was a really nice little HP inkjet printer that had an ethernet networking port built in. This allowed me to plug it into an ethernet port on the Airport Extreme and start using it. That pretty much did it for set up.
One of the reasons it died is because my wife uses it for her internet business and runs it all day printing out invoices, purchase orders and the like. She bought so many black ink cartridges for the thing that she had her own parking space at Staples. But I digress.
I actually had another little inkjet printer that I thought I may use in my home office and we decided to buy her a laser printer since she uses it so much. We ended up getting an HP black and white laserjet P1006 which only cost about $170 but does not have ethernet built in. No problem .. I can just get a USB hub for my Airport Extreme and plug it in and go. Right?
Well I got it all set up and tested the printer via usb cable directly to her Macbook but could not get it to work from the Airport Extreme. After an hour of scratching my head I realized it was really quite obvious. You need to enable printing in the Airport utility. Of course this would have taken 2 minutes if I bothered to Google the issue but there you have it. Learn from my mistake. Be smarter than the printer.
