Printing in XP slows down multitasking

Whenever I run my printer in XP, at home or at the office, the rest of my programs seem to run EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY slow. Does anyone know of any reason for this? I've tried changing from putting it in spooler and send to printer immediately in my setting funtions, and no difference. I print well over 100 pages at a time, and while they're printing, I need to continue working on other stuff, but by the time the screens that I need finally do come up and I've been able to navigate to where I need to be, my printing is almost done. Since this happens on two different computers, I'm wondering if it's something that XP does, or if I haven't set something up right.
Thanks for any insight.
Jerri

 

thrashing?

Really can't say without your computer specs., but a common reason for slowdown while multitasking is insufficient ram, which causes disk thrashing (frequent swapping from ram to disk and back).

 

What kind of printer you have? It may not have enough buffer. When I had my old, old ancient inkjet it would take the whole of my P4-2.4 w/1GB when it printed anything.

Luckily, that old piece of piece dropped dead. I got a laser printer with 8 mb buffer. Now I can do what I want.

 

Hello Jerri,

The factors mentioned by Ray and Sparrow play a part plus the speed of the CPU - mother board and the speed of the hard drive(s).

If your system is more than a year old, it's CPU is probably half the speed of currently available systems.

If you wish to know more about your hardware, download Belarc http://www.belarc.com/Download.html and post back if you have any questions about what the decriptions mean in terms of performance and capacity.

Regards - Charles

 

thanks for responding, everyone. I've got a brand new dell, specifically set up to handle my work load. I worked with a programmer, even though I have no clue what's inside, I told him everything I needed. He never did tell me to watch for the printer. However, I have a crappy Brother MC8500 printer. Now that I see your posts, I think that might be the problem. It comes to a point with this stupid thing that it starts printing jibberish and smiley faces and diamonds and wierd stuff, but only two lines worth and goes to the next page, then I have to shut everything down, reboot, and start over again to get the printer to work right. That might be my problem. I was going to look into an HP 4500. Here's some of my specs. Thanks for the Belarc info. that's pretty neat.
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 (build 2600) Dell Computer Corporation Dimension 2400
System Service Tag: 3NY9G41 (support for this PC)
Chassis Serial Number: 3NY9G41
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.80 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: Dell Computer Corp. 0G1548 A00
Serial Number: ..CN7082141BE063.
Bus Clock: 533 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation A05 12/02/2003
Drives Memory Modules c,d
79.95 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
64.44 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8483B [CD-ROM drive]
Lite-On LTN486S 48x Max [CD-ROM drive]
SMSC USB FDC USB Device [Floppy drive]

ST380011A [Hard drive] (80.00 GB) -- drive 0 510 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM_1' has 512 MB
Slot 'DIMM_2' is Empty
Local Drive Volumes

c: (on drive 0) 79.95 GB 64.44 GB free

Think it could be my printer then?

 

I'd bet on it.

My PC at home is a 1Ghz processor (so nearly 1/3 the speed of yours) although with over twice the memory. I don't see the performance hits you are seeing and don't remember them even when I was running only 256Mb of memory.

Especially since you report getting some garbage printed, it sounds like the printer just can't keep up with the data feed and is going a little nuts.

 

Do you have the latest drivers for the Brother MFC8500? It was issued with drivers for older operating systems. It needs XP specific drivers. Also, it doesn't support XP2 , yet!

http://solutions.brother.com/mfc8500/

 

XP Parallel port printing is exclusive

Hi - this thread is old, but an update might be a help.

I heard at an MSoft seminar that XP is optimized for USB printing. Parallel port printing is considered obsolete. Soooooo, when you print to a parallel port in XP, that task takes over full control of the PC and essentially everything comes to a screeching halt until the print job has been sent.

I'm sure that this is done a bit at a time so something else can go on, but multitasking essentially dies for a while. By Design. Not cool.

I get around this by using old boxes with Win 9x for print servers. This also gives you one place to check if the print queue hangs and you have several PC's on a LAN. There always seems to be a derelict PC around that has enough power to support a printer, and with no apps running, it goes forever. I strip out every possible app including Outlook express and set IE to NO internet access -just intranet, then put them on a UPS and check back every 3-4 months. Sitting the box next to a real workstation and using a $40 KVM switch, you almost don't know the extra system is there.

Lightft