How To Find The IP Address Of A Lexmark Printer

After we published our recent review of the Lexmark S405 Printer where we mentioned having some difficulty setting up the printer with other computers on our network and needed to manually enter the printer’s IP address to get it connected we’ve had a few people ask for more details on how to find out the printer’s IP address.  While the information is tucked away inside the Lexmark’s User Guide it’s not especially obvious unless you already know what you’re looking for so we figured it would be a good idea to create this quick How To guide.

There are actually several different ways to find out a printer’s IP address and most of them apply to all printers, not just those manufactured by Lexmark.  We’re going to start with a couple of the methods that are specific to finding the IP address of Lexmark printers, then we’ll show you a more general method for finding any printer’s IP address.

Method 1: Use Lexmark’s Printer Utility To Find Your Printer’s IP Address

This scenario assumes that you already have your Lexmark printer set up as a network printer on at least one computer but that the setup utility is failing to find the printer on the network when trying to connect additional PCs.  Lexmark’s setup system requires you to connect the printer using the supplied USB cable then switching to wireless when setting up your first computer so as long as you’ve followed the setup process correctly you should have at least one computer already connected and able to access your Lexmark printer.

• Open The Lexmark Printer Home Utility

Click Start > Programs > Open the Lexmark folder > click Lexmark Printer Home to open the printer management program that you installed during the initial setup of the printer.

• Click “Print Test Page”

This will produce a printout with a load of diagnostic information about your printer, including details of how many pages you’ve printed and the status of the various hardware elements of the printer, scanner, fax etc, as well as a printhead alignment test.

The part we’re most interested in though is under the Network Information heading, which shows the status of the printer’s wireless networking connection, its MAC address and, most importantly, the IP address that the printer is using on the network.

Once you’ve got the IP address for your printer just enter it into the manual configuration dialog of the setup utility on the new computer that you’re trying to connect and follow the rest of the steps to set up the printer as normal.

Method 2: Print A Network Setup Page

If for some reason you don’t have access to another PC that’s already connected to the printer and has the Lexmark Printer Home utility installed there is another very simple way to print out a test page with the printer’s IP address and other network setup information.

• Press The Setup button on your printer’s control panel (the one with the Spanner icon shown in the picture on the right).
• Use the Arrow buttons to scroll through the list until you see Network Setup as in the photo then press OK.
• Press OK again to select Print Setup Page.
• Your printer will now print out a page with all the network information, including the printer’s IP address which you can now use to manually configure your new computer to access the printer wirelessly.

Method 3: Find The IP Address Of Any Network Printer

Once again this method assumes that you already have at least one computer able to access the printer over your network.  Because we’re going to be using Windows itself to find the printer’s IP address this method can be used for any network printer, not just Lexmark printers like the first two methods shown above.

• Click Start then go to Computer (or My Computer on older Windows versions).
• Scroll down the list in the left hand pane and click on Network.
  (Alternatively, from the Start menu just click Devices and Printers)
• You should see your printer shown in the Printers section.  Right-click on it and select Properties.
• You should now see a Printer Properties dialog box like the one in the image on the left.  Your printer’s IP address will be shown twice: Once as the link next to Device Webpage (ignore the http:// part) and a second time next to IP address in the Troubleshooting Information section.

Hopefully between one or another of these methods you’ll be able to find out your printer’s IP address without too much trouble.  Like so many things with computers it’s not difficult once you know where to look.