HPLJIII - very slow in XP Home

[RBH]

I have an HP LJIII as one of 5 printers connected to my very high end machine running XP Home. (2.4 GHz P4, 1 GB RAM, 240 GB of HD space) plus all the bells and whistles. Each printer has its own reason for being there.

The LJII has 3 MB of RAM, and is presently connected via a USB/LPT1 adapter. I tried going into LPT1 and not use the adapter, but the results were the same.

When printing plain text, the rated performance results - about 8 pages per minute. When printing a page with some simple "graphics" such as lines around text blocks, and some gray shading, the machine slows to a crawl. It ran much faster in years past under Win 95 with a P166 machine.

I've played with the spooling in the printer configuration, and tried various combinations of other setup choices, but nothing changes the slow performance.

Also, I thought that I used to be able to tell the machine that when running multiple copies of the same page, save the info for additional copies. But now, each copy seems to reload all the info again before printing. And, the page with text and lines and shading is certainly well below the 3MB of memory in the machine.

Under Windows 2000, the performance was also very slow. And since XP is based on Win2K. I would expect that things would be similar.

The LJII will probably last longer than I will. But I sure would love to speed it up. Something in the OS must be impacting this. I'd love to find a way to "adjust" the printer setup to improve things.

Ron Hirsch

 

[cdogg]

It might have something to do with the adapter. Have you tried a Win2K or WinXP pc that has a Parallel port (LPT1) so you can test it without the adapter? Also remember to set ECP/EPP in the BIOS when using a parallel port.

Something's not right. It should work just fine. ~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[RBH]

I guess you didn't really read my post fully. In the second paragraph I did clearly note that I have tried going directly in the LPT1 port on the machine. But that made no difference.

I've also set things in the printer setup to start printing immediately, and to spool the documents.

Ron Hirsch

 

[cdogg]

Ron,

Yes, I apologize for that. You're exactly right. I skimmed your post and didn't catch that part.

I did some searching and found multiple hits indicating that Windows NT drivers are a bit slower that their Win95/98 counterparts (as you already know). Suggestions ranged from:

1) try using the "plain" HP LJ III driver (which neglects access to all of the printer's memory and trays)
2) use 300dpi instead of 600dpi which cuts the spool size by 75%

That's about all I could find. Sorry I couldn't be of more help...


~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[RBH]

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, the LJIII is a 300 dpi printer - there is no 600 dpi that I can disable.

Using a driver from an earlier OS has a good probability of causing things to "hiccup." And, by using a "plain" HP driver, I assume you mean a generic one - but that would totally defeat much of the usage that I use the LJIII for, as I'd lose too much.

So, I guess I'm just stuck with it as it is. In the "old days", HP would be right in there with a solution. But these days, when your HP product gets to be 2-3 years old, they generally don't even support it anymore. I had HP up on a pedestal, going back 50 years when they were strictly test instrumentation and the like. They stayed pretty good until about 10 years ago. I kicked them off the pedestal in the mid nineties - it was a sad day indeed.

Ron

 

[linney]

Have you tried your luck at the HP LaserJet Forum?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Laserjet+III+slow

http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/CategoryHome/1,,413,00.html

 

[RBH]

Linney,

I used to use the HP forums a fair amount. Last year HP had a major overhaul of their forums, and a large number (all?) were just discontinued, with no info if they would ever return. In recent years HP support has been less then good. So, I really haven't been back there so try them out again.

But, after your reminder of their forums, I went back there again, and it appears that they have resurrected a reasonable forum structure. I don't know however if they have HP moderators participating in the forums as they used to have, as I did not browse around.

But, I did post my LJII message there, and I'll see if any worthwhile results appear.

Surprisingly, in the older forums which were discontinued last year, there was a moderator in the HP 970C forum. But sadly, the moderator was not that qualified. She was getting sugestions and corrections from other users, as her personal knowledge base was very lacking.

I'll see if anything results from my current effort there.

Thanks for the reminder.

Ron Hirsch