Why is it taking me 8 hours to print this 30 page PDF?

[Muse]

My HP4M printer, connected through parallel port to my Windows 2000 machine is configured to print in postscript and has been printing a 30 page PDF:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/images/pdf/iHP-120EngManual.pdf.

It's about 1/2 way through and it's been around 4 hours. WTHIGO? This is the slowest print job I can remember. Is it that there's just so much data in this PDF it takes that long to send it to the printer? The PDF itself is less than 5 MB. It's an 8 ppm printer. The processor is slow (1992 vintage), but sheesh.

 

[Nocturnal]

Probably due to the amount of ram in the printer.

 

[Muse]

It has 6 MB RAM. I bought it as an HP4. The HP4 came stock with 2 MB RAM, but it had 6 MB -- I got it used (barely) and the guy I bought it from had bought it with the extra 4 MB RAM. I went the extra mile and bought the postscript card for it, which effectively made it an HP4M printer. The HP4M came with 6 MB RAM (and, of course, the postscript card).

 

[Nocturnal]

Don't most newer lasers come with 16 or 32MB of memory? Printing PDF files in general takes up a lot of memory. It often times a few seconds for just three pages to come out of my LaserJet 3330 AIO.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Nocturnal
Don't most newer lasers come with 16 or 32MB of memory? Printing PDF files in general takes up a lot of memory. It often times a few seconds for just three pages to come out of my LaserJet 3330 AIO.

I guess it's the limited RAM (6 MB), then. It's principally with PDF files that I experience slow printing many times. Never as bad as today, though. I guess I should look into finding some more memory for my printer. Maybe I can get it cheap. I figure 95+% of the HP4/HP4M's have been retired. I picked up a cheap Jetdirect card, so maybe the memory is cheap now too.

 

[henryay]

If you have the quality set to the best, usually the file is more than 100mb.

 

[pcgeek11]

The processor is slow (1992 vintage), but sheesh.

D@MN ! 1992 What is it an Abacus?

You need an upgrade badly!

pcgeek11

 

[Pretty Cool]

When I use to run an old laser with little memory, I had to break the print job into multiple parts. However in my case, the reason was that it simply did not have enough memory to print the complete document. Guess it would not hurt in your case to see if printing a few pages at a time improves your total time or not.

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you tried using the HP PCL driver instead of the Postscript one?

 

[WackyDan]

I suspect the postscript driver.

 

[SpeedEng66]

change the print spooling?

 

[shabby]

Originally posted by: Muse
My HP4M printer, connected through parallel port to my Windows 2000 machine is configured to print in postscript and has been printing a 30 page PDF:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/images/pdf/iHP-120EngManual.pdf.

It's about 1/2 way through and it's been around 4 hours. WTHIGO? This is the slowest print job I can remember. Is it that there's just so much data in this PDF it takes that long to send it to the printer? The PDF itself is less than 5 MB. It's an 8 ppm printer. The processor is slow (1992 vintage), but sheesh.

Theres your answer, i had a printer at work connected with one too and it took just as long to print lots of pages with graphics.

 

[Geomagick]

I just checked the size of that print job for me.

Using my Brother 5040 it comes out as
1200dpi - 192MB
600dpi - 70.4MB
300dpi - 30.4MB

When using a printer with only 6MB of ram it will be having difficulty spooling even one page at a time and thus saturating the parallel bus.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: pcgeek11

The processor is slow (1992 vintage), but sheesh.

D@MN ! 1992 What is it an Abacus?

You need an upgrade badly!

pcgeek11

I don't know. When I bought it used (he told me he'd printed about 10 pages on it :roll: ) I paid around $1300 and then I bought the postscript card for around another $300. Truthfully, it prints beautifully. Very sharp B&W printer. At the time it was an office workhorse. It has a very big duty cycle. I've never had to have it serviced. I'm on around my 6th or7th toner cartridge, guessing. It's just times like these that I get frustrated. It would be nice to have color and especially to be able to print digital photos nicely, but I figure a color inkjet would have problems of its own, especially expensive ink and clogged jet problems. So, I figure I should maybe not "upgrade."

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Have you tried using the HP PCL driver instead of the Postscript one?

Good question. That occured to me too. Haven't tried that. I have tried that for some other problems, but not this one. Usually I just stick with the PS driver.

Originally posted by: shabby

Originally posted by: Muse
My HP4M printer, connected through parallel port to my Windows 2000 machine is configured to print in postscript and has been printing a 30 page PDF:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/images/pdf/iHP-120EngManual.pdf.

It's about 1/2 way through and it's been around 4 hours. WTHIGO? This is the slowest print job I can remember. Is it that there's just so much data in this PDF it takes that long to send it to the printer? The PDF itself is less than 5 MB. It's an 8 ppm printer. The processor is slow (1992 vintage), but sheesh.

Theres your answer, i had a printer at work connected with one too and it took just as long to print lots of pages with graphics.

So, you're saying that the problem is that it's connected by parallel port? I have a Jetdirect card (J2550-60003) that I haven't installed yet in the printer. Plan to run it on the router and have the printer a network printer. Will that speed up my PDF printing?

 

[zephyrprime]

Switch to use the computer cpu for rendering rather than the printer cpu. The name of the option will vary by print driver. Use the jetdirect also.

 

[drum]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Switch to use the computer cpu for rendering rather than the printer cpu. The name of the option will vary by print driver. Use the jetdirect also.

I would look at some other drivers as well

 

[Zepper]

Make sure that you have bocoup free space on the partition where your spooler directory (folder) is and set your printing to use the spooler rather than go direct to printer. That at least should allow you to do other stuff while the doc is being fed to the printer. Also make sure your printer port is set to the best mode for your printer (EPP, ECP or EPP/ECP).

.bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Switch to use the computer cpu for rendering rather than the printer cpu. The name of the option will vary by print driver. Use the jetdirect also.

I don't see settings for the rendering processor in properties for either the PCL or PS drivers.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Make sure that you have bocoup free space on the partition where your spooler directory (folder) is and set your printing to use the spooler rather than go direct to printer. That at least should allow you to do other stuff while the doc is being fed to the printer. Also make sure your printer port is set to the best mode for your printer (EPP, ECP or EPP/ECP).

.bh.

It is set to use the spooler rather than go direct to printer. I don't know where the spooler directory is, though. How do I determine that? I don't know what's the best mode for the printer, but the port is called ECP Printer Port (LPT1) in Win2000 control panel.

 

[Zepper]

Spooler folder is on C: unless you moved it - moving the spooler directory requires editing the registry.

.bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Spooler folder is on C: unless you moved it - moving the spooler directory requires editing the registry.

.bh.

I didn't move it. My C: partition is a Win98SE boot partition but I rarely boot to it. D and E are Win2000 partitions and lately I boot to E. C: has 1.5 GB free presently, 3 GB total. I see no directory that would seem to be a spooler directory on C. No file in C's root is more recent than 1/31/07. Wonder what might be up with this.

Edit: There is a directory C:\WIN98SE\spool\PRINTERS

That directory is empty as well as its parent. My OS is configured to display hidden and system files, so I'm pretty certain they are empty. I figure those directories are there because Win98SE installs them by default. In fact, checking I see that \spool is "hidden."

Edit2: Looking further I found E:\WINNT\system32\spool

It's not hidden, but I figure that's my spooling directory. The E: drive is the one I boot to, is Windows 2000 and 6 GB. There's only 1 GB free presently. Maybe printing would go better if I defragged?

 

[Muse]

Poking around on ebay it looks like I can buy four 4 MB DIMMs for the HP4/4M printer for $14 shipped. Maybe I should jack up the RAM to 16 MB. If I keep looking I can maybe get bigger modules. I think the printer is limited to 26 MB.

Actually, since I have the PS module, I guess I can only use 3 slots for RAM DIMMs.

Edit: Further hunting on ebay reveals that I can buy three 8 MB DIMMs for my printer for about $16 shipped. Seems like it might help considerably, eh?

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Muse

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Switch to use the computer cpu for rendering rather than the printer cpu. The name of the option will vary by print driver. Use the jetdirect also.

I don't see settings for the rendering processor in properties for either the PCL or PS drivers.

Not all drivers have the feature but I've seen it on some hp drivers. I might be called "gdi engine" or "print as bitmap" or "print as raster" or something like that.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Originally posted by: Muse

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Switch to use the computer cpu for rendering rather than the printer cpu. The name of the option will vary by print driver. Use the jetdirect also.

I don't see settings for the rendering processor in properties for either the PCL or PS drivers.

Not all drivers have the feature but I've seen it on some hp drivers. I might be called "gdi engine" or "print as bitmap" or "print as raster" or something like that.

Um, I do see a Print as image checkbox (unchecked) in the Advanced Print Setup dialog (if called) when I initiate postscript printing from this particular PDF.

I don't see any options such as you mention in properties for the printer when accessed from Control Panel.

 

[Muse]

Since I have an as yet uninstalled Jetdirect card for this printer I may (if the card goes in a slot otherwise open to memory) only be able to support two memory DIMMs. One slot has the postscript card in it. So, unless I can find 16 MB DIMMS I may be limited to 16 MB memory, seems to me.