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Printing Problems

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by patracy_uk

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Among others I have a Pentium II 200 with a 10 gig HD and 386 mb RAM ( Norton reports as 30% utilised ). It does slow down on some applications but not so much as it worries me or is too noticable
My problem is with one specific printing job, whenever I attempt to print out cd labels/roundels the machine slows almost to a stop and takes 2 to 5 mins to 'spool'?? the images! It prints ok eventually but this only happens with disc covers, anything else I print goes wiyh no problem no matter which application I use.
I am using a free prog - CoverXP for the labels, but use the same app on other machines without any problem.
Anyone got any ideas ?
TIA
Pete

2 replies

by sgt_shultz

i think the reason it is taking so long is that the problem prints are of stuff that gets sent to the printer as one big bit map image. big=slow. make a prn file of one for a test and you will see it is very bit, betcha. you don't mention printer model or interface...
so you got lots of ram for most things but this too big for ram maybe so computer going to hd for virtual ram. and hd is very fragmented, very slow, or has errors. or all three. maybe also ver small swap file? so chkdsk and defrag for starters?
xp will run w/o swap file at all, so i remove it before i defrag by changing the virtual swap file size to zero. (See Start/Help/'performance'). i don't know if that is necessary. seems to me xp creates/keeps its swap file contiguous but maybe you can run into something on upgraded systems...
then re-set up swap file. i don't know what your setting should be. i let windows choose. others here know. it should be about 1.5 times your ram i think...depends on the apps you are running.... it still slow maybe look at other links in pipeline. bad ram? incorrect parallel port settings in BIOS? check spool settings in printer properties?

by mikex

May be your printer doesn't have enough memory to handle the big graphic files => try to increase the printer memory from within the printer driver

Exmpl: hplj with 1.5 Mb RAM=> Increase ram to @least 2.5 Mb

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