Spooling

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

At 1/31/2004 01:14 PM -0500, Patricia M Godfrey wrote:
> Michael, how is the printer connected to the PC? Must be parallel port,
> if you're printing under 9x. Since you're having problems in Windows too,
> it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to check your parallel port
> settings, first in Control Panel, then in the BIOS Setup. You want either
> ECP or PPP, and experiment with bidirectional mode turned on and off and
> see what happens. What works in these cases is often pretty much by guess
> and by gosh.
Well, Patricia, this has gotten interesting. Turning off the bi-directional
option eliminated the hanging print queue -- files waiting interminably in
the spooler. (I discovered that HP software actually installs two
configuration utilities. Hm.) And it certainly cut the time between the
issuance of the print command and the start of printing. (Do lasers even
need bi-directional instructions?) Next I checked my parallel cable AND the
printer documentation. Lo and behold, HP wanted an IEEE 1284(?) cable, not
the standard cable I'd used. (At purchase, it never occurred to me that
cables had standards.) At all events, all the literature says the IEEE
cables improve data transfer speed (NOT print speed, of course) by a factor
of ten. IEEE cables cost some $15-$20 (standard cables less than $5). The
gold plating (another ten bucks) you mentioned gives the couplings better
connectivity. (You can take an abrasive eraser to regular connectors and
improve things in a second.) So, more improvement. But -- here's the rub --
reading more closely, HP mentions ECP as their preferred port mode. Not
content to let a working machine just do its work, I switched, and
immediately on boot W98SE told me I had installed a new piece of hardware
and it wanted a new driver.
In the past I've had a helluva time uninstalling all the files associated
with a particular driver, and W98's install-new-driver routine is twisted,
at best (I'm reading up to find a work-around), so I killed the new
hardware routine, switched the bios (only) back to bi-directional (its
out-of-box state) and will probably wait until I'm sure I know which files
are which. Why did switching bios modes make W98 think I had new hardware?
It must have assumed a new port. I need to do more research on this. (Some
tidbits in DejaNews, but nothing really explanatory.)

michael.norman@xxxxxxxx