I have a large network at home which I use for my business, and up until now I've been using an ageing ink jet printer that connects to an equally as old iMac, and any files I want printed I have to tranfer them to the Mac and bang them out that way. However now I'm in the market for anew printer since the old one managed to implode or something, in any case I'd love a printer that I could run that didn't need drivers, so I could connect it to my network instead of one machine, and have any of the computers print with it. I have been looking up on this and haven't come up with much info. As far as I can tell, I need a printer that can connect to a network and that supports some sort of univeral printing protocol since I have new and old Macs and Windows machines, and one linux box. I'm not likely to need to print from all of them but some of them I would. I also understand I can get a print server and then plug in pretty much any printer to that but from what I've read I'd still need to have drivers for the printer installed on each machine I wanted to print from, or at least the printer would have to be compatible with the print server. But because I use multi platforms this could be problem I expect? In any case does anyone know what I mean? If you do you couldn't help me out here and give me some info on all this please if it's not too much trouble? Thanks.

You are correct in thinking that a network printer is the way to go. You wouldn't need to dedicate a machine to running it. You can buy printers with integrated print servers that will go on the network and work with your OS's. These are usually the easiest to install as the print driver includes the print server driver in it. Some support IP based printing, just give it an address and print. Many will also support common printer language, but you may not have all the bells and whistles on some OS's. If you decide to go with an external print server make sure the printer you choose to go with it is compatible with all OS's on your network. In this case you'll usually have to install two pieces of software the printer driver and a print server driver. In many cases having a printer with a built in server is much more reliable. Not all printers will work with some external print servers, especially with two OS's. Hope this helps.