I have a question about the time it takes for a HP printer to begin printing. What I mean is the time it takes after the user hits print to the time the printer starts printing. Our HP printers are taking anywhere from 1 – 3 minutes to start printing, even on single pages with very little information. We have reinstalled the entire system (fdisk, reformat, etc.) and the system will start printing almost immediately. After several weeks, the printing start time gets longer and longer. This are actually individual users computers with one printer attached to it via the parallel port and the printers are not shared. We upgraded two of the CPUs to Win2000 and the problem seems to gone away. The printing is slow compared to going to Epsonor Lexmark printers but it is much faster than before.
We watch the user cold boot the computer, bring it back up, only open say word or excel to print a file and the print time seems to take forever. They don’t have tons of applications that arerunning in the background. The process list in on the Task Manager is not packed with processes. It seems to be the normal list.
When I switch printers and drivers to say a Lexmark, printing is almost instant.
The only protocol we have running is IP.
Another note is that we have tried to print using both RAW and EMF, but no difference is noted.
Here are the specs on the systems this is occurring on:
Pentium I & II
WinNT 4.0 SP 5 or 6a
RAM 128M – 256M
HP DeskJet 600c, 800c, & 900c series printers (have tried latest drivers)
HD Space Available – 500M and up
Any help would be much appreciated.