BleepingComputer.com: Trying to understand wireless printers

Hello,

I am new here. It looks like a very good site, and I was excited to find such a nice computer help site.

My problem is wireless printers.

I need to replace my old printer and the one I am leaning towards is wireless. We have a cheap wireless printer hooked up on our college student's computer. It is through our router, I believe.

We live in a very backwoods area and our DSL goes down frequently. It was off a couple months ago for a week. We could not print anything on the wireless printer during that time. It said it couldn't connect or something like that.

I am not real computer savvy, and I have been trying to figure out how to set up a wireless printer without having it go through our router/DSL connection. I need to be able to print even if our Internet is not working. Is this possible, or should I just try to find another printer that is not wireless?

The new printer would be for our "main" computer. It is pretty old. There is no wireless card or anything in the computer. I am running Windows XP. We have a cord from the computer to the router for our DSL to this computer.

I would be grateful for any help or advice.

Under normal circumstances, your printer working is not dependent on your internet working.

This is what it would look like.

[internet]
[modem]
[router] <---- [printer]
[computer]

As you can see, the printer is reliant on the router working. If you lost your printer when the DSL went down, I would suspect your problem was actually your router failing, not your modem or DSL provider.

Thanks.