wrong thread

I had no idea you could plug USB devices like network drives into WiFi access points. For some reason, when I'd seen the USB port on the wireless routers I'd bought for the house in JA, I'd been thinking flash drives--I'd never gone all the way.

meara, are you thinking you'd share the one USB port between the printer and the USB drive? Or are there routers with multiple USB ports (I'm all woo hoo agog at the idea of plugging your printer in there, but why not? I just have a printer with a NIC) Time Machine backs up when it wants to. I wouldn't be unplugging its target drive willy nilly.

I think I definitely have to replace my router. I'm sure it's the source of the intermittent lags in my network. I am sad I can't fix my port shortage at the same time in the same device--that just seems silly. But I'll see if I can at least do it with one stop shopping with the small device Gud recommended.

Meara, my HP all in one wireless just uses the same wifi that anything else does; nothing plugs in.

my HP all in one wireless just uses the same wifi that anything else does; nothing plugs in.

Yeah, and I figure if they give me one of those kind, yippee hooray. But it's also possible they'd give me one that won't do wireless.

ita, it only has one USB, but I don't know how any of it would work for printing, which is why I'm asking!

You can always go with an Airport Express if your printer isn't wireless (and your router doesn't have two USB ports - I have it in my head that trying to use a hub would cause problems, but I'm not sure that's right. Anyway, I always have had my router and printer in different rooms, so I haven't experimented with how they interact).

Excel is driving me bonkers - I've got a cell with some text in it and it's displaying as ######## (Excel code for "ack, too much!") no matter how large I make that cell.

Any idea how I can force it to display the text? It's not really that much, which is the confusing part.

[edit - fixed this by the annoyingly cludgy method of copying the text into a blank cell and then pasting that cell on top of the old one. That should not have worked. Stupid Excel.]

Meara, I have an Apple Airport (big one, not the express one), which has one USB port on it. I have a powered USB hub plugged into it, with 2 hard drives and a printer plugged into the hub. My old iMac and my 2 year old PC laptop can access data on either drive (it's where my iTunes is), and print to the printer. No problems. Now, if only I could get the appleTV to stream from the hard drives without needing iTunes running on a computer, I'd be a happy camper. But that is beyond your questions ;)

The only routers with USB ports that will work with Time Machine are the Apple Airport Extreme models. The cost of one of those, plus a cheap hard drive is going to be much more expensive than a Seagate Black Armor NAS.

Hmm. I am very confused now. I think I will just have to wait to buy stuff until I get the new printer and see how/what it is. I'd hoped to do a bunch of re-organizing setup stuff this week while I'm home with no work, but it'll have to wait.

Especially since the printer will almost certainly be in a different room from the router (cable modem is in living room, office is up two flights of stairs)

meara, could you write to the new company and ask them about which printer it will be? I did that with one of my clients - asked them about which laptop so that I could buy the port replicator for my home set-up way ahead of time.