Printing slows system

[pooholly]

I've got two WindowsXP Pro systems in a workgroup. System A has an Okidata ML320 turbo printer attached via parallel cable, and the printer is shared. When system B prints to the Oki, the CPU utilization on A jumps to 95% and drags the system to a crawl till the job is finished. I swapped the Oki out with an HPLaserjet, and system A works fine even when printing from across the network. Put the Oki back on and the system bogs while printing. Properties on the printer are set to spool print jobs, and start printing immediately. The LPT1 is set to ECP in the BIOS. Tried all of the different drivers in XP, and even played with emulation settings on the printer itself.
Any help would be appreciated thanks.

 

[bcastner]

The Oki is a line printer, and does not have the internal memory buffer or speed of the laserjet. Therefore it demands a great deal more of the machine hosting it.

You can do some things to help out:

1. Change, in BIOS, the printer port to Standard or EPP instead of ECP. The ECP gains you little, and is more resource intensive than the other choices.

2. You need to experiment if turning off bi-directional communications helps.

3. You should explore adding a generously sized network hardware print server on the device, or at a minimum a generously sized hardware print buffer device.