Setting Printer Timeout. 1

[basil3legs]

We have a DOS application which will only print to a local Printer port. This is currently set to LPT2 and the port is captured and sent to a network printer. One of the machines running this application is DOS based and I have used #capture in the user's login script and set the timeout to 3 seconds and this prints fine after about 3 seconds (funny that!). However, the other machines running the applications are Windows based and wherever I try to set the timeout, it seems to ignore it resulting in the server waiting for a few minutes before finally printing. I have tried using #Capture in the Login Script as well as capturing the port in Windows and setting the timeout there but to no avail, it still takes ages.

Does anyone know how I can get this to work, i.e. print quicker??

Thanks in advance.

 

[Provogeek]

Try enabling form feed, most of the time you disable form feed to stop that extra sheet of paper from spitting out. This is a case when you want it. I could be wrong, getting rusty on queue based printing since I took up iPrint/NDPS

Brent Schmidt CNE,Network +
Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple

http://www.kiscc.com

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, Basil

Also it sometimes helps in Windows to configure to print direct to the printer and not to spool in order to avoid double spooling (and resulting delays). Especially with old DOS programs, in some cases they may not close the printer properly and by printing direct the output will become available more quickly.

Best regards
Jock

 

[Granvillew]

Hi Basil,

I have a network with 8 departments with seperate print captures set in the login script. I have a mixture of DOS, Win95/98/2000 clients and the script capture command works for all of these. I have the TI= set to either 5 or 15 which was arrived at by the "suck and see" methodology.

Hope this is of some use to you.

 

[basil3legs]

Thanks for the replies.

Provogeek, I believe I did try that (by accident!) but it still had a long delay. Also, this is impractical as the program prints labels one at a time so this would waste 6 to print 1 if it did work.

JockMullin, I hadn't thought of that so will give that a try and see what happens. As I stated above, this is to print labels so we are only talking 100 characters at most so stopping Windows queuing will not cause a problem with the system pausing whilst it prints.

GranvilleW, just out of interest, on the Windows machines, are the printers set up at all in Windows or is the only reference the capture in the login script?

 

[Granvillew]

Hi Basil,

Where a printer is only used by the DOS based apps, I have only used the login script but where a client is printing to the same printer from Windows apps (Office in the main) I have setup the printer under Windows.

Hmmm! That's something I've never thought of, I wonder which of the setups the DOS app actually uses. Sorry, that's well beyond me.

 

[vd256]

Hi Basil,
Suggestion, try setting PrintBufTime = 5 in the Win9x system.ini file under [NetWork] and [IFSMGR] sections, find or add these sections AFTER the [386enh] section.

See thread started 3/24/01 by ramani #182-66171 in Microsoft:foxpro (versions 1 through 2.6) forum.

This one tip has saved us a tremendous amount of time instead of waiting and waiting for printouts.

 

[basil3legs]

Thanks vd256, Worked a treat!!

Worth a star so other people see this - and adding another to the original thread!