Network printing doesn’t have to be so difficult

So I decided earlier this weekend that I wanted to re-attempt to set up our home network so Abbey could print from her MacBook pro from anywhere in the house. I tried to set this up a couple of months ago by sharing the printer off of my on my main Vista PC but I ran into some security and Vista ala OS X issues, so I gave up.

Well this weekend while we were out at Office Depot I picked up a Netgear PS121 v2 network print server thinking I should be able to just plug this in on the network, plug in the printer and BAM have it all up and running. While after a good 2 or 3 hours this evening I realized it wasn’t going to be that easy and got fed up with it.

Then I remembered that Apple offers a nice little print server on their AirPort Express product, so I ran back to Office Dept to return the crappy Netgear server and headed over to the Apple store and picked up a AirPort to express.

Of course right out of the box I was able to plug it in to the wall, plug it into the network and then plug the printer in and BAM OS X saw the printer on the network..Now I did have to install some extra software on the PC, but that was a couple of clicks and BAM the PC saw the printer too…sooo smooth.

There was no network settings, no IP addresses or printer queues to setup the printer just worked, like it was supposed to. Why is it that Apple is the only company that seems to be able to comprehend this kind of ease of use?