So, following the PC problems that culminated in me getting a new PC at work, I've got a weird problem. Local printing is incredibly slow - it takes 30 seconds to print the first page, then there are 15 second pauses between pages. The printer is an HP Laserjet 1160 which worked quickly and efficiently on the old PC.

A little background; this new PC is used but in nice clean condition. There were a couple of other printers installed, but I removed their software both via the add/remove programs control panel, and also by removing their drivers from the print servers list in the printing control panel (including XPS printing - wtf is that?). I've reinstalled the HP software, and removed it and tried generic HP PCL5 drivers, and no matter what I do, it's slow to print.

Now here's the funny thing - I needed to print something from my Mac earlier, so I set up the HP as a shared printer in Windows. Every job I send to the PC from my Mac prints instantly. This suggests that the problem is a spooling problem within Windows itself.

Any ideas for where I go from here?

*BUMP*

Install a Mac?

Microsoft's attempt to copy PDF - it's a portable document format. However the only thing I've ever seen that generate it at all is Office, and I've never seen a file of that format 'in the wild', so I think we can consider it a dismal failure.


Start up task manager and switch to the 'performance' tab, then print something from another program. See what happens to the '% memory used' counter. My first guess is the Windows driver is doing ' raw print rendering' i.e. generating an image of the page at printer res, which is chewing up an awful lot of RAM and causing the PC to have to dump a lot of stuff to scratch before passing the page to the print spooler. With the Mac it might be sending the printer raw PCL, which the PC won't have to render and thus can send straight through.

If that does appear to be what's happening, see if you can tweak any settings on the printer - even to the point of sending postscript rather than PCL if you have to.
Jon

Thanks for the suggestions Jon, I'll have a play around.

Sorted.

I tried watching memory usage but nothing was spiking. The printer doesn't support postscript, so that wasn't an option. However, it was PCL related. It turns out that the previous PCL driver I'd tried was PCL6 - this time I found HP's universal PCL5 print driver, got rid of all the old stuff and all's good. Instant printing.

Now I've run out of paper..

Sadly there is no software fix for the paper thing.
I'm a little surprised the printer didn't like PCL6, it should have full support. Looks like HP recommends the PCL6 driver for all windows environments and PCL5 for mixed networks so maybe that's it (still seems a bit weird though).

Reminds me of that old joke about the blonde who'd run out of paper in the office, so she phoned someone up and asked them to fax her some more.