Printing from a PPC over WiFi

HP offers HP Mobile Printing, a Small application that allows you to print email and notes directly from your PPC to a network printer. The program works with most HP printers as well as some Epson and Canon models. Obtain the program from HP’s download site for HP Mobile Printing for Windows Mobile. Save it to a temporary directory on your PC and run the extraction program. Then, while the PPC is connected via ActiveSync, run HPMobilePrinting.exe from the folder where it was extracted.

To enable printing from the PPC, you must first allow printing over your network. This is set up in the same manner as creating shared folders, first allow printer sharing from your Network setup and then share the printer by right clicking on it in Windows Explorer (see the section on Networking your PPC).

Tap on HP Mobile Printing from the PPC’s program list, which will show you a screen like Figure 11. Select Tools, Configuration. Select the Printer (tab)(Figure 12), then select Network printer (Figure 13-1), and Choose printer (Figure 13-2). Use the drop down list (Figure 14-1) to select the printer’s manufacturer, then the model (Figure 14-2) and select Windows Shared (Figure 14-3), then Add… (Figure 14-4). Type in the path to your printer (see Figure 13; the path, which is the computer name, can be found like described above for setting up the router, and the printer name can be found by opening My Documents on the PC, selecting Printers, right clicking on the printer of interest and selecting Sharing) and click on OK and OK again for the printer name (changing it first if you desire).

After following these printer installation procedures, you will be at a screen that looks like Figure 16. This window will allow for the selection of an email message or note files for sending to the printer. This is also the window you will be taken to whenever you subsequently start the HP Mobile Printing from the Axim’s program list.

While this software is quite useful for printing email, notes or word documents, to print other programs (PowerPoint or Excel, for example), you'll need an additional program, such as Westtek ClearVue^TM. Note, ClearVue is not freeware.