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DPChallenge Forums >> Hardware and Software >> Two USB printers printing different files? HELP
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08/17/2008 07:59:14 PM · #1
Help please!

I'm going mad about this.

This week I've upgraded my laptop RAM to 4GB and bought another printer. The reason for this is because over here I need to do fast prints on weddings to show to the gests. I was using until las year RawShooter Premium, exported small jpegs and with a printing software called PrintStation I did the proofs and print them.

With the arrival of D300 and Lightroom things got quite slow (I kept doing the jpegs for printing but LR is just too slow). So to speed thing up I thought hadding another printer.

Yesterday I had a wedding. There where 4 cameras, 12 GB of Raw files to process on LR, convert to small jpegs and finally to print. Whe I send the first batch of files to the first printer nothing unusual happened. It was 23 pages. When I send the second batch of 16 pages to the other printer things got quite slow. The first printer paused the printing, the progams just got stuck and the laptok blocked. I had to turn the laptop off by pressing the power button down.

then I reebooted the laptop, only opened the PrintStation, did smaller batch of pages and then a batch to each printer. The first printer beggin ok, until I send the second batch to the other printer. The first one stopped, and for each page I've sent it spitted a blank page, and only when taht ended the second printer begun to print.

this is quite odd to me, because I though Windows (Vista in my case) could use more than one printer at a time. Is it possible that the printing spool can only manage one print, and when the other is inicialized it just jams?

Help would be much appreciated.

08/17/2008 08:03:54 PM · #2
Had spooling finished to one printer before you started the second print job?

If you're using the same program to print the two jobs, it's possible that the second print job interrupted the first.

You might try printing the two jobs from different programs. This allows the programs to spool separately.

Mind you this is just a theory and I may be out in left field.
08/17/2008 08:09:54 PM · #3
Yes, the spool had finished (I think) before I started to prepare the other files, because the program for printing generates the files and send then one by one to the spool. I onened it and I saw the nunber of pages rise as the printing program sent the pages for printing, and the printing program would not let me proceed untill all the pages had been sent to the printing spool.

It could be what you've said. It is the same printing program, and I have (obviosly) to change to the other printer when sending the second batch of files.

The printers are two HP inkjets by the way.
08/17/2008 08:57:03 PM · #4
I think this might be a USB issue. Do your laptop and both printer support USB 2.0 If one of the printer only supports USB 1.1 then both printers will slow down to 1.1 speed which is very slow compared to 2.0
08/17/2008 09:10:43 PM · #5
Both printers are USB 2.0

I've tried both connected to a hub and both directly on the laptop usb sockets.

Another strange thing that I've noticed is that when I open the spool manager and it shows the number of pages to print and the size of the files... each A4 page generated by the printing program is about 100MB... It should be much less than that, around 5 or 6 MB. It's quite strange. Could it be a bug from the printing software that is running my laptop out of memory?
08/18/2008 08:28:17 PM · #6
Any other opinions?
08/20/2008 09:31:34 AM · #7
last bump
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