Printing
A networked printer can be used by many people and allows for better resource management and flexibility. With these benefits comes the challenge of finding a printer, which is much more difficult when it is not directly connected to your computer.
When printing over a Windows 2000-based network, you can choose between printers within your local area network (LAN) and printers available on the Internet.
The Find Printer wizard supports searching Active Directory, and the Add Printer wizard supports adding Internet printers.
Active Directory allows searching on a range of printer attributes to find a printer that meets your particular needs. If subnets are being used to define sites within your organization, Active Directory can find printers that are located near the user. This is a significant advancement, because finding the closest printer has long plagued both administrators and users.
To search for nearby printers
From the Start menu, point to Search , and then click For Printers .
In Location , type part or all of a printer location, based on the syntax that administrators have implemented for describing printer location in Active Directory, and then click Find Now .
For example, if you are in Los Angeles and you want to find all printers in your deployment in the city, type US/LAX in Location , assuming this fits with the printer location syntax used for describing printer locations in Active Directory. This might return results such as:US/LAX/1/101
US/LAX/2/103
This would indicate that there are two printers available in Los Angeles. These results could indicate the printers are in buildings 1 and 2 and in rooms 101 and 103, if that matched the syntax that administrators applied.