Basically, at some point I lost the ability to print from the computer I have connected directly to the router. The rest of the computers in my network print just fine wirelessly. I'm not sure what happened there but all of the normal MS stuff to correct the problem hasn't worked. Finally I used a network repair tool from Brother (printer manufacturer) which looked for the printer via IP address and ONLY looked at addresses starting with 192. When I checked the IP address of the printer it started with 172 and so did my laptop and I presume every other "printer friendly" device in the house. I don't know how those all got on 172, I thought 192 was sort of a default, but from what I've researched this does seem to be a problem.
The questions are: Can I change the IP address of my computer to 172 to join the rest of them? Should I? If not, should I change the addresses of all of the other devices to start with 192? What are the potential problems with any/all of this? What is the difference between them? Am i on the wrong track? What is the average flight speed of a swallow? Please render answers and opinions as the site rules allow. Thank you.
