Xerox's Mobile Express Driver is a free download that helps laptop users connect and print to a variety of printers without having to install specific drivers.

If you are a travelling executive, or anyone who has taken a laptop on a business trip, the chances are that at sometime you've wanted to print a document but been unable to because you didn't have network access rights, or the correct drivers.

I tried out the Mobile Express Driver on both a Windows Vista laptop and on a Windows XP desktop, neither of which were joined to the corporate Windows domain in IT Week's offices.

Once installed, the tool looks like any other print driver on your computer, and you simply select it as you would any standard printer when sending a document for output from an application.

The Mobile Express Driver then scans the network subnet your PC is connected to, and lists any printers it finds. If it does not find any, you can instead specify an IP address range to search through.

In my tests, the Mobile Express Driver quickly found about a dozen printers, allowing me to select one that I knew was close by and hit 'print'.

There are some limitations users should be aware of; the Mobile Express Driver only works with printers that support PostScript, although this should include pretty much any network or departmental printer that ships these days.

If you are using a laptop and have jumped on the Wi-Fi guest access at a site you are visiting, then the chances are that you won't find any printers. Guest access often provides users with a connection only to the internet, for obvious security reasons.

However, if you can find a live Ethernet port and plug into it, the chances are that you will be able to find a printer and use it, making the Mobile Express Driver a handy tool to have if you want to print out and leave some documents with a customer, for example.

The Xerox Mobile Express Driver can be downloaded here. The full version is about 48MB in size.