Printer installation woes

A little bit of help for people struggling to install the HP PSC 2510 Photosmart printer onto a wireless network.

Yesterday, I spent approximately seven hours trying to set a wireless connection between my dad's printer with his new computer. Every time I ran the installation program,it would get stuck in a loop and kept going back to the 'which type of connection do you require' screen. It was bloody annoying, so I decided to search the Internet. I was rather peeved to find that many people had had the same problem and no-one had posted a fix. Indeed, most people seemed to have given up and left it as a wired connection.

I tried the 'online help' chat thingy with a bloke from HP, and he did try very hard indeed, but even he was stumped, and then the damn connection dropped and 'Calvin' disappeared.
Anyway, in the end, I sussed it for myself, so here's how you do it.

First of all, this page is useful.

1. Go to the HP website and download the latest installation software. The one on the CD supplied with dad's printer was way out of date.
2. Go into the printer's networking menu using the keypad on the machine itself (setup >> networking) and then choose the option 'wireless radio', and set it to 'OFF'.
3. Using the printer's setup menu, print out a network configuration report.
4. Using your Internet browser, connect to your router using the gateway address. On the Belkin routers I use, it's 192.168.2.1 but if you use a router from another manufacturer, it'll probably be different. If you are on an ad-hoc network, it will show a channel number under your channel and SSID settings. Make a note of this number,and also of the IP addresses of any machines connected to the network, and the subnet mask.
5. Connect your printer to your wireless router, using a CAT-5 ethernet cable. There should have been one supplied with the printer.
6. Remove any wireless networking dongle from your PC, or disable your wireless card, as appropriate.
7. Connect your computer to the router using another CAT-5 ethernet cable.
8. Run the software installation program, selecting 'wireless network' at the appropriate place, entering the channel number when it asks for it. If you use WEP, you will also need to tell the printer the WEP key.
9. Once the software is installed, remove the ethernet cables, reinstate your wireless dongle/card on the PC, go back into the printer setup menu and switch the 'wireless radio' back to 'ON' and get printing.

I hope this is of some use to someone out there, and saves them several hours of annoyance.