Printers and other devices work with HomeGroup as well in windows 7

So what about devices? We’ve heard from you that sharing printers needs to be much simpler. While we have made it super easy to add printers to Windows, we needed to bring this simplicity to the home network. USB printers are still tied to a specific PC and can’t be shared out very easily. People typically email files to themselves to retrieve on another computer, or use USB keys to move their files to the computer with the printer. That had to change.

In a HomeGroup , if you have installed a USB printer that has a Windows logo, the other people on the HomeGroup would get this printer automatically installed on their computers. They won’t see a prompt, they won’t need to answer any questions – it would just show up, and “just work.” For non-Windows logoed printers, we need to ask the user for permission to install the printer. HomeGroup members will see a prompt that a printer has been found in the HomeGroup. Clicking on this prompt installs the driver. The reason we had to do this was to ensure that users consent to 3^rd party code that hasn’t been through the rigors of the logo program. One of the big benefits of this system is that you no longer need to find, download, and install the driver manually on multiple computers. The driver (for the correct architecture) is just copied from the computer that has the physical printer attached. This saves time and network bandwidth. With a HomeGroup, there will no longer be a need to think about sharing a printer. If you attach one to a computer in the HomeGroup, everyone else will get it installed and ready to use.

In addition to printers, devices like photo frames, game consoles (such as the Xbox 360), and media receivers (like the Roku Soundbridge) can benefit from some of the easy setup, as well as all the shared media in the home. For setup, we have reduced all the UI within Windows that deals with these devices to one simple checkbox:

Once you are part of a HomeGroup, we turn on Windows Media Player streaming support, so not only will your computer detect other WMP libraries on the network and allow playback from them, devices would also be able to consume the shared media content. Another blog post will go into more detail on an exciting new feature called “play to” which would also be automatically enabled in a HomeGroup enabling you to send media from your PC to any supported picture frame or media receiver, and never have to deal with the minimal UI you have on these devices, which you can see in the demonstration of the Day 1 keynote at WinHEC. If you check a box in HomeGroup in Control Panel, all existing and future devices in the home will detect and consume the media on the HomeGroup computer. All these previously complicated settings are now simplified with HomeGroup.