Printers again - not printing large image files

[Little-Miss]

I've been trying to print out some pictures for a member of staff. In the queue the spool but the when it looks like its about to print, it gets to 50.1mb/181mb and fails...

Any ideas?

[Brpilot99]

I had a similar problem when trying to print pictures the drive that the spool directory resided on was running out of space ...
moving it elsewher cured the problem for me ..

[SYNACK]

What kind of printer is it, it may be that the printer is running out of memory. We had that issue with a bunch of network colour lasers which was fixed with a printer memory upgrade.

[Little-Miss]

I did wonder about space, but there is over 8gig on there, i would have thought that was enough...

[Little-Miss]

Kyocera 5300D

[SYNACK]

This thing FS-C5300DN Workgroup Colour Printer ?

Could well be the memory as it may be decompressing the file in printer memory. Try printing one page at a time to limit the memory usage and if that works look at training users or upgrading the printer memory.

[Zourous]

Are you getting any error pages spill out?

I had a similar problem last week, but was getting PCL XL error messages when printing. I resolved the problem by changing the printer driver from PCL6 to PCL5. From my experience PCL6 causes a lot of strange issues. PCL5 is meant to be more relaxed in error checking and printing tends to run through better.

[Brpilot99]

8 gig seems OK untill you try to print a number of pictures !! To make sure do you have another drive with more space that you can use for the spooler? Moving it will also show if the spooler folder itself has a problem

[Little-Miss]

Well, as they are leased ive logged a call with the company so am waiting for a call back.

I've just changed my drivers to the KX drivers because i was having an issue with missing text when printing in colour. I have tried the other driver out of curiosity but it appeared to have the same problem...

[Little-Miss]

Printing one page at a time like Synack suggested seems to have worked. But thats a PITA! The evil epsons never had that issue.

[Little-Miss]

Isn't it frustrating when outside support cant work it out either. I've rebooted the server incase it was confused from all the messing i have done. I tried to print the same doc, it spewed out the first page and then stopped. lol Well its different to what it was doing original, but it still errors. They're talking about memory upgrades now. *sigh* Anyone got any other suggestions?
I did move the spool folder but didnt restart the spool service, dont know what difference that would make but am going to try that again. I just find it shocking that the epsons only have 32mb installed whereas the kyoceras have 256mb! Do they really render things that differently?

[SYNACK]

The Epsons probably only retrive/accept a bit at a time rather than downloading the whole job before starting to print. You can sometimes set the drivers to force this behaviour but it depends on the device and the driver. Personally I'd just let them upgrade the printer memory which should sort it and make it faster and overall more reliable with big jobs or high loads. Most entry level workgroup printers are ram starved by default.

You would need to restart the spooler service for it to pick up the new spooler location so for fullness of testing you should restart that service.

[soveryapt]

I've been having similar issues with the Olivetti Branded versions of the printer. Anything upwards of around a 40-50mb file, it can take about 5 mins to spit it out. I've moved the print spooler to a different drive which has certainly sped things up, but it can still take a silly amount of time. I can only assume it's the processing so I might try the different setting for print after first page not wait for the whole job and see if that works.

Be interested to hear if you do get the bottom of things with yours tho Little Miss as it could solve my issue too ..

[Little-Miss]

Will do!

[Little-Miss]

I could honestly cry out of frustration now.

When i was sorting out these printers i made it explicitly clear that we are a primary school and print out a hell of a lot of photos.

They are saying they will come and put memory in one to test it out, at a cost which i hadnt planned for. Plus if they say to me one more time "we've got loads of these in schools and we've never had this problem before" im going to scream. We arent another school, we are THIS school now come and sort it out.

It's typical, the first lease i organise and its all going horribly wrong. Plus i get the feeling someone is waiting for me to crash and burn