Printer so sloooow!

October 22, 2006 10:50 PM

Why is my printer spooling so slowly? Recently ( I dont know how recently) I've noticed that instead of printing page after page, there is a pause of a few seconds between each page of the pdf's i'm printing off. it takes forever, and i'd like to fix it. help!

The printer is a year old Lexmark E232. I've had no previous problems with it. I use Foxit 1.3 for reading pdfs and I've tried updating my printer driver. Any ideas on helping my computer/printer speed things up? I have several hundred pages to print on a regular basis, and a three second pause between pages is annoying and time consuming! Thanks!

posted by gilsonal to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Response by poster: Oh, its a laser printer, btw
posted by gilsonal at 10:51 PM on October 22, 2006

Have the type of documents changed? I help run computer labs on a large campus, and we see this problem primarily with PowerPoint presentations that have been converted to PDF. Especially when the person leaves a background gradient in.
posted by sbutler at 10:56 PM on October 22, 2006

Does it have a "print as image" option in the print dialogue? I've noticed printing as image (whatever the hell that is) clears up a lot of big PDF print job clusterfucks on laser printers.
posted by Rumple at 11:12 PM on October 22, 2006

I second sbutler. I see this with scanned images (of chapters from books or handwritten notes), which were done at very high resolution and converted to PDF without reducing the resolution. The printer spends a long time processing each page, even though the pages don't look unusual to the naked eye.
posted by halonine at 12:19 AM on October 23, 2006

(It could be something else too of course! This is what I see most often.)
posted by halonine at 12:20 AM on October 23, 2006

Foxit Reader 2.0 is out, so you might give that a try as well.
posted by flabdablet at 1:00 AM on October 23, 2006

This has happened to me. Printing pdf's to a laser printer, and suddenly there's a 20 second lag between pages. I was using adobe acrobat though. I opened the printing dialogue and noticed that each page size was ridiculously large, causing it to take a long time to send each page to the printer, thus causing the lag. It was a scanned pdf, which was not that big but there was something wrong with it. I deleted and rescanned. Doesn't help your problem, but I thought I'd pass along what I noticed.
posted by striker at 6:25 AM on October 23, 2006

You could try going to Advanced > Print as Image, that has helped me with a few strange activities. I have a few older machines here and we are all networked to a single lazerjet. The newer machines with 1GB+ Ram never have this spooling issue, the older machines always do. If I have to pring 100 copies of something I always do it from the larger machine... this makes no sense to me either, but it's the only viable workaround I have found.
posted by prostyle at 7:45 AM on October 23, 2006

Also make sure that your paper tray is set correctly in print options. If you set the tray incorrectly once, then any pdfs printed subsequently might have inherited that setting.

If your pdfs are set to use the manual bypass tray instead of the auto feed tray, your printer will try the bypass tray first. If there is no paper there, it will select from the auto tray next - but it does the check for every page, which would account for the slow-down.
posted by gemmy at 9:17 AM on October 23, 2006