help: HP 4600hdn problems with large spool files...

[ric]

hi all,
got a couple of HP 4600hdn units here with 176MB RAM in them (1x 16MB,
1x32MB, 1x128MB). they've been giving us grief with powerpoint
presentations. certain presentations generate *massive* spool files
(presumably down to the way that the driver renders images etc), that
cause the printers to crap out mid print, and spit out sheets with
control characters on it. shifting to PCL5 drivers helps a bit, but
doesn't fix the problem. printing in black and white works as a
workaround, as does printing the file in sections. all the other
printers we have here (5500C's etc) all cope with these files fine.

before i go buy some more memory for these puppies, has anyone seen
anything similar on these printers?

 

[Fred McKenzie]

got a couple of HP 4600hdn units here with 176MB RAM in them (1x 16MB,
1x32MB, 1x128MB). they've been giving us grief with powerpoint
presentations. certain presentations generate *massive* spool files
(presumably down to the way that the driver renders images etc), that
cause the printers to crap out mid print, and spit out sheets with
control characters on it. shifting to PCL5 drivers helps a bit, but
doesn't fix the problem. printing in black and white works as a
workaround, as does printing the file in sections. all the other
printers we have here (5500C's etc) all cope with these files fine.

Ric-

In years past, I recall printing some of those massive PowerPoint
presentations, but never experienced your problem. They just took a LONG
time to print!

We used HP 4600dn's without any HDs. Is it possible to configure the hdn
printer to spool to the HD?

Your problem might be in the print server rather than in the printer. Due
to the large files, the printer often has to signal the server to pause
sending. Could your server not be responding to the signal, and
continuing to pump data to a deaf printer? How much RAM do the 5500Cs
have?

When I wanted to increase my 4600's memory, I found that none of the big
computer stores sold memory strips in such small sizes. I had to find a
small local computer store that had some older memory they would sell
cheap. As a result, it was not very expensive to upgrade to the maximum
amount of memory the printer can use.

Fred

 

[me]

hi all,
got a couple of HP 4600hdn units here with 176MB RAM in them (1x 16MB,
1x32MB, 1x128MB). they've been giving us grief with powerpoint
presentations. certain presentations generate *massive* spool files
(presumably down to the way that the driver renders images etc), that
cause the printers to crap out mid print, and spit out sheets with
control characters on it. shifting to PCL5 drivers helps a bit, but
doesn't fix the problem. printing in black and white works as a
workaround, as does printing the file in sections. all the other
printers we have here (5500C's etc) all cope with these files fine.

before i go buy some more memory for these puppies, has anyone seen
anything similar on these printers?

When I had a QMS 2200 a friend asked me to print some powerpoint things
and it did the same sort of thing, the powerpoint viewer generated huge
spool files, which the printer gave upo on. In the page/print setup
there was an option about backgrounds or something that I disabled which
greatly reduced the size.

Alternatively could you output it to a PDF file and then print that
instead?

 

[Ed Ruf]

hi all,
got a couple of HP 4600hdn units here with 176MB RAM in them (1x 16MB,
1x32MB, 1x128MB). they've been giving us grief with powerpoint
presentations. certain presentations generate *massive* spool files
(presumably down to the way that the driver renders images etc), that
cause the printers to crap out mid print, and spit out sheets with
control characters on it. shifting to PCL5 drivers helps a bit, but
doesn't fix the problem. printing in black and white works as a
workaround, as does printing the file in sections. all the other
printers we have here (5500C's etc) all cope with these files fine.

before i go buy some more memory for these puppies, has anyone seen
anything similar on these printers?

Have you tried the various options in the print driver which specific
the type of info spooled? Raw, EMF, etc. Have you verified you have
enough file space for the spool file and that it is contiguous? I
believe high fragmented spool files can lead to problems. Have you
also tried lengthening the timeout for the printer jobs?

 

[Marek Williams]

Alternatively could you output it to a PDF file and then print that
instead?

Another suggestion would be to open the files in OpenOffice.org
Impress and print from there. Impress does a pretty good job importing
Powerpoint files. Maybe it would work better in this case.