Share my brother with my wife???

For years, we’ve had a “one Mac-one printer” home office. Recently, my wife bought a Dell XPS 400 so that she could bring her office work home. We now blissfully work next to each other in our shared home office space, manually plugging and unplugging our respective USB cables to a Brother HL-5040 every once in a while when one of us wants to print. Printing is fine, but switching cables is getting old. I'm open to non-wireless router as the apparant easiest and cheapest solution, but only if I won't have to spend endless hours trying to figure out why one or both of us can't print.

Any feedback on whether or not going through a router will be more of a pain than it's worth, especially since we only print on occasion? I'd hate to explain to my son that the reason his mom and dad got a divorce was because we couldn't figure out how to make a Mac and PC share my Brother using a router.

Any feedback and suggestions would be greatly appreciated (including brand of router, if you have any favorites). Thanks!


G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)