Just won't touch
Just about every Belkin product I ever tried seems to have been garbage, unreliable, or borked. I made a choice a while back to simply rule out ever using them for anything. Ever.
There is no shortage of wireless routers that will let you hook up a printer and maybe some USB storage too and make them available to anyone on the network. If your router lacks this ability, there are plenty of gadgets that will add it by bridging USB to an Ethernet port. The downside of either approach will be instantly …
Airport express has one usb and I have been using my one to wireless share my printer on my home network for years. I'm using a Tenda router and XP and vista PC's so this is not an overtly Apple household.
Works perfectly well for me and the non-techy parts of my family.
I'm sure there much be other companies out there doing the same thing. This device would be useful if you had several devices to share I guess.
It seems excellent and, a couple of years ago, I'd have had one because home-networking USB printers was something of a black art. However, you can now get HP printers with built-in wireless for under £50 that work brilliantly. It rather seems like Belkin have produced the solution to an age-old problem - just as the problem disappeared. And a bloody expensive solution it is too!
The big downside with this is that it's not a proper network print server - it's a remote USB connection. So anything plugged into the Belkin is only accessible by one client at a time (two people cannot print simultaneously).
The other major downside is that it's Belkin. I've never come across a less reliable brand (even PC World's Advent is more reliable!).
...and then every time I want to print anything from the laptop downstairs (or my kids want to print something from the machines in their rooms)...
4. Run up stairs (or across landing) to office to switch PC on.
5. Wait ages for PC to boot.
6. Either run back upstairs (or across landing) to office to shut PC down or put up with noisy power sucking box whirring away for no good reason.
It's an expensive way to buy a print server if that's really all you need but apart from that it's sounding more and more like money well spent to me... :-)
Some people use the Airport simply as a wireless bridge, ie. a device to connect 2 networks wirelssly. The Belkin seems to offer an alternative. Other alternatives are the poorly concealed ethernet cable or the ham-jamming power line transmitters. I am still at the decorative cable stage unfortunately. Would be nice if somebody would make a £50 Airport equivalent without all the Apple software bits, just good wireless n.
It turns out that the other day I bought a shiny new wireless sharing device that had a free* printer, scanner and card reader thrown in and still had a spare USB port to add storage to.
It said "Wireless enabled Multifunction Printer" on the box, but who am I to argue?
*bar a few quid.