print server really slow

[athlonfan]

At our office we have a testing room (tests them on things like Word and such) with 3 machines, 2 running celeron processors and WinXP and one with a P3 running Win98 SP2. The Win98 machine is acting as a print server for the other 2. When one of the XP machines prints, the 98 machine gets really really slow (moving the mouse has about an 8 second delay) and the cpu usage goes to 100. Basiclally, the third machine becomes unusable. Also, it takes forever for the print to spool. Does anybody have any ideas what can be done to remedy this? I seem to remember something about an patch to make XP better communicate with 98?
Thanks,
Richard

[Midknyte]

that isn't surprising, especially if it's an inkjet or low end laser printer. Most low end printers are basically just ink carts and a motor; no brains. Your system has to do all the calculations that a formatter board used to do. I'm thinking you want to bump up the ram.

what kind of printer do you have? is it parallel or usb?

I've never heard of a XP to 98 patch. I know some people install NetBEUI on xp, though.

[athlonfan]

It's an HP deskjet 5650 and the 98 machine has 510mb ram according to the control panels.

[Midknyte]

yeah, that printer looks like it has some high overhead, especially if you use the 6 colored inks. It does have some "brains" since you can run it on a jetdirect.

You might have to mess with the spooler settings. see if you can increase the spooler file. You can also try setting a static page file.

did you check for updated drivers/patches?

[athlonfan]

no, I haven't done much, mainly because I'm being limited by the fact that the testing room computers are not on the internet. We tried hooking up one of the hp laserjet 3200's to the computer, but now I keep getting W2 Invalid Pers errors. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Richard

[Midknyte]

Not sure what that W2 error is. I couldn't find it in the service manual. is that the exact error message?

normally, you don't want to use a print server (or any server) as another workstation. Make sure you have enough disk space for the spooler file.

Win98 SP2? just saw that. I think you meant Win98SE.

[athlonfan]

OH, btw the printers are being hooked up with parallel cables. Why I don't know. Any ideas?

[athlonfan]

Oh, yeah, thats what I mean, 2nd edition. I've tried saying print directly to printer. Leaves the workstation usable, but the printing is slow as hell.

googling brings up w2 invalid pers means that the file is not in a proper postscript language or something like that. Not for this particular model, but I'm guessing they all mean the same thing across all HP's.
Richard

[Midknyte]

you're using postscript fonts? we usually use PCL. Interesting that it wasn't in the service manual.

how did you set up the sharing? did you set up a static IP for the print server? you should always use static IPs for servers.

on the xp workstations, you should create a local printer with a standard tcpip port (the IP of the print server).