HP2605 printers soooo slow

[farquea]

We have a lot of HP2605 printers in the school. If anyone tries to print large documents such as powerpoints of 5MB+ it crawls up to the size as it spools the job which takes an age, we're talking silly time, and more time than not it will "error" anyway.

We have a HP3800 which i tried to print on and it flies through the queue and prints in seconds. Now i dont know if there is something like driver/configuration issues at play here because i cant see how the 3800 can take about 45 secs to spool and print a document and the 2605's can take 10mins and might not even print it in the end. Even though the 3800 is newer i woulnt expect that difference to be that big.

Any suggestions or anyone had similar problems when printing large files?

[DMcCoy]

Check device manager for DOT4 printing support. Choose update driver - then manually pick Microsoft's USB printing support. This fixes our issues on XP with other HPs

[farquea]

I'm confused. We have a print server and all printers are networked. So im not too sure where id find this DOT4 printing support?

[DMcCoy]

I assumed that it was local as you didn't mention them being networked anywhere. If it's all of them then you could try the swapping to the PCL5/6 driver depending on what is already on the server.

[m25man]

Humor me,
I've posted so many times before about these damn printers.
Set one up on your local machine, create a local IP port and install the driver locally....

Now try it. Is that any better?

These are Host Based GDI Printers which means that almost all of the processing and rendering tasks are off loaded to the PC or Print Server that is hosting the queue rather than fitting expensive hardware and ram inside the printer!
That is why they are so cheap.

If you choose to attach dozens of them to a Print server and send loads of stupid sized jobs to them (which kids often do, such as 12 megapixel images pasted directly into Word documents without reformatting them) you can end up with massive queues and buffer overruns of the printers I/O.

HP's proper colour network printers don't start until your ready to spend £500+ almost everything below this is targeted at Home users/small workgroups that would share them as I have described in the first two lines above.

Yes, I know it works if you put them on a 2003/2008 Print Server, but that was not how HP intended for them to be used and if you trawl the HP ITRC Support pages you will find post after post from HP Gurus with much more inside information than I stating this fact.

The 2600n only shipped with 16Mb of RAM in comparison to the 128Mb found in most similar devices and it's not upgradeable.
Send it a small word job with a properly formatted 100k Jpeg on it and it will fly, even queue nicely on a server.
Fill an A4 page with crap copied off the internet in bitmaps add some stupid TrueType Fonts that have been enlarged and are not resident in the printer so they have to be rasterized and you are going to tie your print server up for hours or stall it completely!

HP developed the "Universal Print Driver" to try and overcome the obvious limitations of these devices and to be fair this has help solve many of the problems that users had encountered with what otherwise are fairly decent budget printers and I should know as I have had one myself for over 3 years now but even now I can send it a complex pdf file to print and the printer will throw it's toys out of the pram!

[pwds]

Can't swap to a PCL driver as this printer is host based. Essentially the server or computer it is connected to will do ALL of the image processing and send the result over the network.

Add to this formula a server retired from front line duties and relegated as a print server with a number of these hanging off it and you've got a nasty result.

Try not to install more than one to the same print server, install drivers locally (with printer IP to connect) wherever possible. If you are required to use one print server, ensure that you have adequate disc space available on the server, and uninstall, move or stop anything not actively required.

Updating firmware and drivers may well help, but fundamentally the printer itself is your problem and all you can do is mitigate it.

See the HP forums for further details (and many rants) on host based printers.

[m25man]

We have a lot of HP2605 printers in the school. If anyone tries to print large documents such as powerpoints of 5MB+ it crawls up to the size as it spools the job which takes an age, we're talking silly time, and more time than not it will "error" anyway.

Any suggestions or anyone had similar problems when printing large files?

I would tactfully get your ICT Teachers to read this:-
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/po...168821033.aspx
There are plenty of other guides for other applications but the principles are the same.

Im still shocked to see ICT being taught to kids without some of these rather basic and obvious guidelines.

On several occassions when I have been asked to increase a kids quota because they are unable to save their important coursework I have had to open the documents myself and compress ridiculous sized images down.
Office Documents reduced from >80Mb down to a few hundred Kb in a few mouse clicks!
Raw 12mb Image Files pasted into single page Word Documents!

Not only would this solve local storage issues, backup windows, server capacity and printing problems just in UK Schools alone we could probably recover PetaBytes of wasted disk space!

The failure of Teachers to educate the users in efficient document management probably costs the tax payers millions in unnecessary computer hardware!

[SimpleSi]

AFAIK the 2505 series are not host based but do only come with 64MB of memory which is upgradeable.

I've only got one of them and I have noticed it does take a long time to bring up printer properties but non of the teachers in the infants that use it have ever complained about it in practice

It locks up about once every 2 months and it had trouble printing a large excel spreadsheet in the early days that I fixed by switching drivers from PCL to postscript (or the other way aorund - can't remember and I'm not there at the moment ))

I'll try a little torture test out on it (and my 2600s as well) when I'm next in

regards

Simon

[m25man]

AFAIK the 2505 series are not host based but do only come with 64MB of memory which is upgradeable.

@SimpleSi is quite right, the 2605n is an entirely different beast and I apologise for not picking up on this.

With 64Mb Ram and a Postscript Interpreter on board this should be able to take quite a pasting from the print queues.
The server can dump RAW data at it and let the onboard electronics do the business.

That being the case I'd make sure that you have the lastest firmware loaded on the formatter and use the more compatible PCL5 driver rather than PCL6 or Postscript.

However, despite the previous Rant which I would repeat was directed at the HP 2600n the 2605 does not escape the wrath of a number of disgruntled users in the ITRC Forums with HP clearly targeting this model at the SoHo market.

[SimpleSi]

I forgot I had 2 of these!

Well a quick test with a 35MB bmp pasted into a Writer document.

HP2600 - 75 secs from start to page ejected from printer

HP2605 - 10 mins (approx - got distracted while baby sitting it but def between 8-12mins!)

Both printers are shared via a W2k3 server.

HP2605 using PS driver

I was talking to one of the teachers and she said - oh yes I knew this printer was slower than the other but its ok for small print jobs. (its in a corridor closer to the classes than the suite).

More results in a bit

regards

Simon

[SimpleSi]

mm

Setting up as direct network printer on a workstation using PCL6 driver - 3 mins to print.

Same as a shared printer set up as PCL6 on server.

If I print to it via shared server PS printer - it creates a big file in server C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS - which takes a long time - 3 mins and keeps printing dialog box on screen for that length of time - file ended up being 435MB

Then it took another 6 mins before it came out of printer (and the 435MB was still on server until page came out)

If I print to it via shared server PCL6 printer - printer dialog goes in 17 secs - only 6MB file gets created in server C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS and that dissapeared while I was typing this.

So it seems that basically, the PS driver produces enourmous files that need sending over the network to the server and then onto the printer and then the printer needs to actually print it!

But if using PCL6 - the original file size is much much smaller and therefore everything at every stage goes a lot lot quicker!


regards

Simon

[pwds]

So the HPCLJ 2600 is host based and the HPCLJ2605 is not? I knew the HPCLJ 2505 was not but to have differences even within the same product line.....

Clear as mud as usual from HP.

With that clarified (and apologies from me for getting it wrong) I'd definetely recommend changing to a PCL6 driver if you're not already doing so.

[SimpleSi]

JFI the 2600 that takes 75 secs to print also displays the printing dialog box for that length of time - it waits till paper actually comes out of machine before handing back control.

regards

Simon

[m25man]

This might help get your head around the whole process

PCL is device dependent whilst Postscript is not.

This is an interesting answer

The manufacturers PCL drivers effectively translate the dots on the screen into the dots on the pages.

@300 dpi an A4 Page is 4,000,000 dots in colour this is x4 M,C,Y & Bk so 16,000,000 dots needs to be handled.

Have you ever read a Postcript File?

It's all in english, so 16,000,000 dots all described in words the whole idea was to make the output file portable and device independent so printers could use the EPS files in all sorts of input and output devices.

As most printers are 600 dpi or higher its easy to see how a document could reach 400 Mb during the spooling process and why the poultry 16 Mb of Ram in the 2600n is only any use for printing postage stamps.

The 2605 with it's 64Mb of RAM will obviously handle a few more pages at the same time but even that is a limited resource considering the way we throw jobs at them.
Postscript however needs some serious processing power hence professional RIPs have oodles of RAM and many dedicated Hard Disks.
Many of your photocopiers have Raster Image Processors and Hard Disks based upon the EFI (Electronics for Imaging) Fiery systems.

For this reason unless you intended to send or print, to or from an outside agency I can see no useful purpose for using a postscript printer driver on your print servers and thats why PDF's were invented.


Interestingly, Apples love of 64bit computing made easy work of Postscript hence all of Apples Laserwriters were based upon this as the favoured PDL whilst windows struggled to do anything with it in NT4 and Win 3.1 with a 16bit OS

Postscript still forms the basis of the Display and Printing technology in OSX and of course PDF's were born from it, clearly the Apple Macs 64 bit OS and Adobe applications will still make use of your printers Postscript abilities but stick to PCL or your OEM's equivelent driver for your PC's and have enough RAM in your printer to take the full force of an entire classroom dumping the contents of a photoshop lesson to your poor unsuspecting HP2605n

[SimpleSi]

I can see no useful purpose for using a postscript printer driver on your print servers

When I set up 2 other 2605 (forgot I got one for wife at her school as well!) - they both had problems printing massive Excel coloured spreadsheets (gave an actuall error page printout) and switching to PS drivers cured this.

I'll probably keep my wife's school office printer on PS as they do print large spreadsheets often (or maybe try and see if there is an updated PCL driver) and all 3 computers print direct to the laser so there's not the overhead with spooling to a server but I'll switch the other school back as the teachers rarely print such beasts and they have other printers available to them if necessary.