>>>I have a report that displays strange print speed descrepancies. I have made sure to strip out all but the ORIENTATION settings in the FRX file. On the production computer I have printed out this report to a Laserjet 4 via the SET PRINTER TO NAME ... command. This takes about 30-40 seconds per page (unacceptably slow). However, if I create a different printer and tell Windows 2000 that it is a LaserJet 3 then when I print to that printer the report is much, much faster (as fast as the paper can come out of the LJ4). Again, one physical printer (a LJ4), two different configurations (LJ4 and LJ3). The LJ4 configuration is extremely slow and the LJ3 is very fast.
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>>>Am I not cleaning enough out of my FRX file? Is the LJ4 driver just much slower than the LJ3 driver? FWIW, I develop on a machine which has a LJ3 as its default printer.
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>>You're right, under normal circumstances with a fairly up-to-date computer there should be no appreciable difference in print speeds between the two drivers.
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>>Who was the author of the LJ4 driver? If it was HP, do you get the same results using the W2K LJ4 driver?
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>These are both from W2K.
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>>Is the LJ4 directly attached to the W2K computer or is it a network printer? If it's local, is it shared with other users?
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>It is on the network via a JetDirect card
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>>If it's directly attached by a parallel interface, is the port standard parallel, EPP, ECP, or EPP+ECP? The LJ4 driver may be bi-directional and you may see slow or intermittent performance if it's standard, or if the computer's EPP or ECP modes are not properly implemented.
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>>Also, if the driver is bi-directional problems may be encountered if the parallel cable is substandard. Ideally it should be IEEE1284 (if memory serves).
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>>If it's a network printer a bi-directional LJ4 driver may run into problems depending on print server/queue settings.
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>Do you have any ideas on which settings might be more problematic?

Do users:

- print to the JetDirect card directly, or
- print to a server (i.e. computer) queue, which in turn feeds jobs to the JetDirect card?

In most environments option #2 is preferred because the JetDirect has a limited amount of RAM to buffer print jobs; if that fills up it reports "busy" and print jobs seem to finish slowly.

In Advanced...Print Processor you could try setting data type to EMF rather than the default RAW, this may reduce total data volume sent to the print server/printer.

If there is any bidirectional support in the driver, turn it off.