HP 1300 and printing from DOS

[mark]

I'm leaning towards buying an HP 1300 Laserjet printer, that will be
attached to a Windows XP computer for local printing. One package that
I need to print from is an old DOS based accounting system, running in
the Windowx XP DOS emulator.

My understanding is that printing from DOS can be a problem.

It looks like the HP 1300 has both a USB and parallel printer port, so
I'm thinking that I will want to use the parallel port.

Should I expect problems and if so are there any workarounds.

Thanks for your feedback.

mark

 

[Alan]

I'm leaning towards buying an HP 1300 Laserjet printer, that will be
attached to a Windows XP computer for local printing. One package that
I need to print from is an old DOS based accounting system, running in
the Windowx XP DOS emulator.

My understanding is that printing from DOS can be a problem.

It looks like the HP 1300 has both a USB and parallel printer port, so
I'm thinking that I will want to use the parallel port.

Should I expect problems and if so are there any workarounds.

The 1300 has PCL6, PCL5, and Postscript emulations. Most DOS apps
should be able to run one of these -- if you have a choice, use
PostScript. I'm running DOS apps under Win98 and print via parallel
port without any problems. In fact, Windows spools the output, under
pure DOS I had to run a TSR spooler to get back to work in a
reasonable time. There are ways to set it up so that you can use USB
and the DOS app thinks it's using a parallel port, but it won't be
nticeably faster if at all. I think you might have the USB port
connected as well (or to another computer) at the same time, most HP
printers allow that.