Slow Printing in Windows 2K

[zaneryrie]

Hi All,

Does anyone else have this problem? We have several workstations with Win2k Pro and both local and networked printers. Printing has slowed to a crawl using local printers. 20 minutes for 40 pages of text.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

thanks,

zr

 

[ShineOn]

I have this same problem. I look forward to finding the answer.

When printing to a Netware queue, printing is lightning-quick, but when printing to a locally-served queue on the Win2KPro machine with printer attached slows to a crawl.

If it's an unnecessary service, I want to disable it. If it's an obscure registry setting, I want to change it. If it's a bug in the spooler, I want a patch... - Do I maybe have to back-rev to SP1 spooler programs?

 

[zaneryrie]

Wow. It's been a whole year since this problem first reared it's ugly head. My solution, which I should have posted earlier, was to change the resolution of the printer. You might want to check this, but some of the machines we have were actually pausing between pages. We are using HP LJ 4 printers, locally attached.

Changing the resolution to 600 dpi or less solved the problem for documents in B&W. I believe I found this out by searching the MS KB.

Hope this helps.

zr

 

[ShineOn]

I don't think that's my problem. It has to be the spooler in Win2K.

I also misstated the setup. I'm servicing an LPR print server across the LAN, so all that the local PC needs to do is spool the job and spit it over to the LPR server. I used to do the same kind of thing with NT4, without these issues.

When you select print in any program and choose this printer, it takes forever to spool, and while it's spooling the program you're printing from is held hostage.

Maybe it is the same problem, but in a different context - perhaps the Win2KPro LPR process emulates a parallel connection and expects it to behave differently than a network redirect.

 

[mlevine]

Where we work, setting the DPI helped as well as the driver type. There are Postcript files and PCL based drivers out there I believe. These might help as well.

 

[Wirdo]

I had printer problems, but our network had 2 reasons. I was we were using Novell print services which Win2k dont like and can cause slow printing an lockups. The other was how it was spooled used too much space on the drive which didnt have much left to use. So if you use Novell you might wanna get rid of the print services and if your drive is allmost full clean some stuff off it. It worked for me.

 

[ShineOn]

Wirdo,

Now you've set me off. No offense - I just can't let this lie. This is not a flame, I just have correct some misstatements in your post, and air some pet peeves along the way. Nothing personal...

WhatI had posted was *not* a Netware printing issue. Netware is and continues to be far superior to Windows for file and print serving. It's also more secure and stable out of the box for internet services. If you look back in the thread, I said in my earlier post that printing with Win2K print services was dog-slow as opposed to lightning-fast printing to a Netware queue.

If *you* had problems, it was probably something in your configuration. What Netware version were you using? What client were you using to access Netware services? Were you using queue-based or NDPS/NEPS? Were you spooling locally and then sending the print job to the Netware queue, or were you going "direct to printer," which is much faster because you don't have to sit and wait for the inefficient local Windows spooler to finish it's thing? Were you using the recommended "raw" format? These are only a few of the factors that go into problem-free printing, a lot of which are because of quirks in the different versions of the client OS.

Win2K has and continues to print to Netware print services problem-free. You send something to print, and it prints almost right away, and your program is free to do other work because the local Windows spooler isn't holding up the program you're printing from and slowing everything else down by handling I/O from the program to the hard drive before sending that same I/O over the wire, and sucking up CPU cycles to boot. <gasp>

I agree about the cleanup of your drive - in fact it's best to automate cleanup of temp files, set up a fixed swap file and defrag your Windows file system on a regular basis to avoid problems. It's also a good thing if you avoid making recommendations to forklift back-end network services that are superior and work well for millions of users just because you personally couldn't resolve an issue.


Assuming you at least had Netware 4.11 (since Netware 3.2 and prior have been unsupported for a number of years,) if your drive space problems were on your Netware server, you probably set up your queues on the SYS volume and neglected to set them for immediate purge of deleted files. Best practices dictate that you should always set up print queues on a volume other than the one that holds your system files and swap space, and to make sure the print jobs don't stick around after they're done. Same thing on Windows - don't put your swap space on the same drive that the spooler is using.

It's also kind of a pet peeve of mine that so many people refer to Netware as &quot;Novell,&quot; even people that prefer Novell products to Microsoft. Those same people don't refer to Windows as &quot;Microsoft&quot; - as in &quot;I consolidated four of my Microsoft servers onto one Netware 6 server and haven't had to reboot for 6 months.&quot; But they'll say &quot;I got rid of my single-processor Novell server and replaced it with 3 Win2k quad-processor servers to provide the same level of service in a different way.&quot; Actually, the're usually embarrassed to say that, but you get my drift. It's like people will go out of their way to mention what version of an MS OS they're running, but lump all versions of Netware under the generic &quot;Novell&quot; label as though there's only one product ever produced by Novell and it's the NOS they use, or were using.

It seems unfair to me to generically compare all versions of one OS to a specific version of another, as though there should be a valid comparison regardless of versions or release dates. Why not compare Lanman server to Netware 6? Maybe because nobody in their right mind still uses Lanman? Then Netware 2 shouldn't be generically compared as &quot;my Novell server&quot; to NT4, and Netware 3 shouldn't be compared by like inference to Win2K. It *is* fair to compare Bindery Services to Domains and NDS to AD, however, as well as IPX/SPX to NetBeui/NetBios and Netware/IP to WINS/IP. And Groupwise6 to Exchange 2000, and Zen for Desktops/Zen for Servers to SMS2 and Intellimirror. And BorderManager to MS Proxy Server combined with CheckPoint's Firewall1 and MS's RRAS. And Novell Cluster Services to Windows &quot;Clustering.&quot; And Apache/Tomcat for Netware to IIS. And iFolder to Briefcase. and iPrint to... does MS have a product that supports IPP? I don't remember...

Well, time to get off my soapbox. Sorry for the harangue but I needed to get that off my chest.

-Later...

 

[zaneryrie]

Amen brother! Preach it!

zr