Network Printing Problems

I have a small network and am attaching a Lexmark Optra N printer to the network. I had it connected to one of the networked computers through the parrell port and shared it that way with the other computers and it worked great(good speeds ect). The printer has a network card installed. I have ran a network cable from it to our network hub. I have reinstalled that printer on one of the computers through TCP/IP protocol and it works, but the print speeds are extremely slow. Example: I send a print job to it and it gets sent to it fine, but it takes a very long time to print -- it prints one page and then it takes about 15 seconds for the next page to begin printing. It didn't do this when it was connected throught he parrallel port and shared from the computer it was connected to. I want to eliminate the parrallel connection so the other computers on the network can use this printer regardless of whether that computer is on or off.

Thanks.

 

I think you will continue to have performance issues as long as the printer's limited memory is being asked to do things it really isn't designed for. Especially things like maintaining it's own internal print queue. I think this requires some overhead even if only a single job is going to the printer at any one time.

The usual for a network printer connected to the LAN via it's own ethernet card is still to have a PC acting as the print server/manager. You pick the device that will do the job and set up the network printer on it as a local printer but rather than use LPT1/2, you create a new port (LPR is normal with microsoft networks) using the IP address of the printer and that PC does the housekeeping so all the printer has to do is turn the job stream it gets from it's "server" into printed pages.

Of course this still means you need a PC running but the advantage is that you can have a single PC operate a number of LPR ports. But with only one network printer, that really isn't much of an advantage to you.

The only suggestions I can make if you don't want the printer dependent on a production PC but still need higher print speed is to either buy a small print server that hooks on to the network and attaches to the printer or get a PC you will dedicate to only running the printer and use it as a print server. The print server device would then remain on 7x24 but you wouldn't have a normal user's PC tied up doing the job.

You might check to see if your Optra N has all the memory it can use and if not, add more. But printer memory is fairly expensive.

 

Not sure what you mean about a print server. Can you explain on how to set that up please. Also I have 5 more computers that want to use this printer. What is the best way to set them up? Sorry about the dense questions. First timmer at this network printer thing.

Andy