Network Printer Slooowwwwww

[AndyK]

Hello all, I have just installed an HP Color Laserjet 5M laser printer on my network, the printer has 68mb RAM installed and appears to work well.

My problem is the speed of actually starting to print, I have tried connecting via the parallel port and also assigned an IP address and printed via the network card, whichever port I try colour documents take an age to start printing, for example a 3.4mb picture (shows as 3.4mb in the queue on the server when using parallel) takes around 4 minutes before printing starts (the data light is on on the printer straight away), am I doing something wrong?
I assumed that anything smaller than the 68mb printer memory would start printing within a few seconds.

Any advice appreciated

Cheers

Andy

 

[azev]

Check on the printer properties, normally you can speed up printing by setting the printer to start printing immediately rather than start printing when the last page is spooled.

 

[AndyK]

Hello, I have checked the options and "start printing immediately" is checked, should I check "print directly to printer"?

 

[spidey07]

if it is a color laser, that's how long they take to warm up.

Also you may be trying to print postscript on a non-postscript printer. If that's the case then set your driver to use PCL.

Try going to hp.com and reading the manual and see what it says.

 

[AndyK]

It actually looks like a spooler problem, when i use it on LPT1 on my server and print a job from a workstation the spooler shows the data processing at around 15k a second, hence the delay of 4 minutes for a 3mb file, once the spooler is finished printing starts within around 5 seconds

 

[taxi]

Slow first page and slow PPM on older HP Color laser printers are just a HP signature.

I have worked with a 4550 and a 8500 that were both very slow. No amount of RAM or speed of the conection to the printer will make them any faster.

I don't know if they have improved there new ones. I got tired of trying to get HP Color lasers to work and dumped them. Switched to Xerox. There PPM and first page out times were as advertised and felt faster sometimes.

 

[AndyK]

Would a cheap dedicated 100mbit print server (such as the genius gps300d) improve matter do you think?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: AndyK
Would a cheap dedicated 100mbit print server (such as the genius gps300d) improve matter do you think?

No. You already have a print sever on the printer itself.

 

[AndyK]

Surely there must be some resolution to this problem, I called HP support earlier and they blame the PCL driver in Windows XP, I asked for an alternative but they say they havent written an XP driver....