[K12OSN] printing bandwidth on client

[ssanders at coin.org]

Hi all,
For sheer convenience (and I was given a nice network printer that
works) I am going  to put a printer at a terminal location for the first
time. I have the printer working as a standalone network printer with no
problem. It only has a USB or ethernet connection.

The terminal where it will be located is an old PII/233 with 64mb ram.
It has nice video, and works great as a terminal. I think it only has
old USB 1.0, which was probably the problem when I tried to get client
USB keys working locally on it.

Questions:
 Is there any difference in network traffic by having the printer
standalone on the network as compared to being connected to the
terminal?  There is only one cable drop in that room, and would
require a hub/switch to share the connection. That network segment is
100mbit, with a gigabit switch upstream aggregating the other traffic
to the server.

USB 2.0 multi-USB cards are cheap of course, and would be easy to add
to the client. Would this be better in any manner for printing? That
terminal is reliable and always powered on, so that won't affect the
availability of the printer.

Does having a local printer on the client need more RAM or CPU?
TIA