cameramonkey
MIS
We have about 550 XP Pro PCs and 23 2008R2 print servers driving 100 or so Ricoh printers in our enterprise. They are now all running the Ricoh v3.6.0 universal driver.
Over the past 3 months our printers have been running slower and slower. Its been a slow death spiral, but as of the last 2 weeks it has accelerated and now most clients are taking FOREVER to print. it takes up to 60 seconds to display the print dialog, then up to 3 minutes per page to print.
If we print direct to the printer/copier via local IP port (bypassing the 2008 server), the problem disappears so it appears to be an issue with the 2008r2 servers.
The only guaranteed fix so far is to remove all network printers on the client, restart the client spooler to release the drivers, then uninstall all physical printer drivers (leave pdf writers, xps writers, etc). After reinstalling the printers all seems to be OK.
While doing the above task is great and all, its really not practical with a staff of only 5 IT folks; A conservative estimate is approximately 150 man hours to fix by hand.
Sometimes changing the printer port settings on the server helps such as changing from RAW to LP. The curious thing is that returning the printer settings to the original port settings does not cause the problem to return so I doubt its really a problem with the settings. Many sites ran for almost a year with no problems.
A curious thing we noted was after changing the printer driver from version 3.3 on the server(s) to 3.6: ONLY our limited test deployment of windows 7 clients actually updated the local drivers as expected the next time they tried to print.
Possibly a red herring, but users reported the print issue accelerated after upgrading from (dont laugh
) Adobe Approval 5.0 to Reader 10.1. I take that report with a grain of salt, but figured it was worth mentioning.
As I recall the first (after each restart) time a client tries to print it should check the server driver version and update as necessary. XP isnt doing that. Even trying the trick of renaming the server queue momentarily and returning it to the original name doesnt cause the drivers to update.
Generally speaking the users are local admins, so permissions should not be an issue.
with the above being said, Anyone know of a RELIABLE way to FORCE XP to update the print drivers the next time it connects to the server queue?
Over the past 3 months our printers have been running slower and slower. Its been a slow death spiral, but as of the last 2 weeks it has accelerated and now most clients are taking FOREVER to print. it takes up to 60 seconds to display the print dialog, then up to 3 minutes per page to print.
If we print direct to the printer/copier via local IP port (bypassing the 2008 server), the problem disappears so it appears to be an issue with the 2008r2 servers.
The only guaranteed fix so far is to remove all network printers on the client, restart the client spooler to release the drivers, then uninstall all physical printer drivers (leave pdf writers, xps writers, etc). After reinstalling the printers all seems to be OK.
While doing the above task is great and all, its really not practical with a staff of only 5 IT folks; A conservative estimate is approximately 150 man hours to fix by hand.
Sometimes changing the printer port settings on the server helps such as changing from RAW to LP. The curious thing is that returning the printer settings to the original port settings does not cause the problem to return so I doubt its really a problem with the settings. Many sites ran for almost a year with no problems.
A curious thing we noted was after changing the printer driver from version 3.3 on the server(s) to 3.6: ONLY our limited test deployment of windows 7 clients actually updated the local drivers as expected the next time they tried to print.
Possibly a red herring, but users reported the print issue accelerated after upgrading from (dont laugh
) Adobe Approval 5.0 to Reader 10.1. I take that report with a grain of salt, but figured it was worth mentioning. As I recall the first (after each restart) time a client tries to print it should check the server driver version and update as necessary. XP isnt doing that. Even trying the trick of renaming the server queue momentarily and returning it to the original name doesnt cause the drivers to update.
Generally speaking the users are local admins, so permissions should not be an issue.
with the above being said, Anyone know of a RELIABLE way to FORCE XP to update the print drivers the next time it connects to the server queue?
