Router assignes variable address to wireless printer 1

[oserdavid]

I have a Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO ADSL2 router and an HP Officejet Pro L7780 wireless printer, running Vista SP1 Business - but I imagine the issue is common enough with different combos and OS. Documents often do not print because the printer has been assigned, say, address 192.168.2.2 whereas the computer printer software is looking for 192.168.2.3. (addresses vary within a small range .2 through .6). I can change the port address, to that which the printer itself tells me is the one the router has assigned it today, and print fine. But then my wife tries to print something from her computer - and I have to change the port address on hers, too. Bah!

What I can't seem to do is solve the problem by enabling 'Printer Pooling' and checking multiple ports/addresses on the computer printer software dialog, under 'sharing' - because that simply doesn't seem to work. Should it? Or is that for some other purpose?

The only other thing I can think of is to somehow force the router to always assign the same address to the printer. But I cannot seem to find how to do that via my router setup - probably because I don't know the terminology, which acronyms I should be looking for, and what settings to modify when I find this out. Or maybe it can't be done, anyway?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
David

 

[tlcscousin]

Why not set a static IP address on the printer itself. You can usually put it outside the range you specified (in your case 192.168.2.7) Then it should always be accessible.

 

[oserdavid]

Mmmm...Thanks tlcscousin. But going to printer's advanced wireless settings and selecting 'ip' warns that changing the setting here will set the printer outside of the network - press OK to continue or cancel to exit. I chose to exit. I'm afraid I'd need the ramifications explained to me before following this bit of advice. Setting up the printer again from scratch would be a painful exercise for me. It would be ideal, if it were simple and still allowed access to the network easily. But is it?

I note that on my router I can elect to set permanent ip addresses to 'all' the computers on the network (which is variable, depending on which offspring are staying), but there doesn't seem to be a way to select some for automatic allocation and some for fixed. I guess I could do this by collecting every unit's mac address yada yada yada - but it's a messy time consuming solution. Ho hum
David

 

[tlcscousin]

If you setup the IP address subnet mask and gateway properly you should have no issues.
If using wireless and you have security setup on the router you will have to setup the wireless security on the printer properly as well.
If it fails you should be able to just tell the printer (using its interface) to go back to dynamic ip addressing and be right back where you started.

 

[oserdavid]

tlcscousin - that was brilliant! It works (so far...). So thank you very much - a far simpler and more straightforward solution than others I've seen on the web. So straightforward that..d'oh! You're evidently a good bloke to know...
Best
David