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Server 2003 Printer issues

RadiclDreamer

RadiclDreamer

Diamond Member
Running a server 2003 SP2 box with almost 300 printers attached, mostly HP and Ricoh. When adding a new printer or changing the driver my server seems to hang for about 3-4 minutes with the spool service spiking the CPU before the system becomes responsive and seems to operate like normal. Any idea what could be causing this?
 
I found having a ton of drivers that sometimes conflicted caused this. For HP using the universal driver helped a ton. Mostly because it removed about 20 differing versions of "HP4000/4050/4100/4150/etc/etc" drivers that were out there. If you have any kernel mode printer drivers, try to update them to Type 3 usermode drivers. IMHO 2008 (r2) handles printers better than the xp/2003 spooler.

--edit--

In addition... use the "print management" administrative tool. It will list out the printer driver versions in a easy to read list. Quite a few of the HP / Canon ones are the same driver with an INF restricted to one printer type. You then end up with the same base hp driver (HP's is very generic and supported hundreds of their printers) but small rev differences that can cause all kinds of odd server issues. IE "6.1.7601.17512, 6.1.7601.17534, 6.1.7601.12534, 6.1.7601.16745, 6.1.7601.17545" which means your server loads all of those drivers in to RAM. If you force update them all to say "6.1.7601.17512" now you have one driver loaded that manages 5 printers rather than 5 drivers managing 1 printer.
 
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I do have a limited number of drivers installed, I am very anal about that but I've had mixed luck with the universal driver. I try to stick with pcl 5 drivers as well since they tend to be less problematic in my experience
 
Does perfmon show what is locking up the system? Ram usage / page faults? Process monitor (sysinternals) attached to spooler.exe might give you some clues.
 
I've seen this happen when older versions of the HP universal driver were installed, even if the printer you're adding doesn't use the driver.
 
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