Printing immensely slow on new machine

[Jonathan K. Cohen]

I just got a Dell workstation (Precision 670, Windows XP SP2, and
installed the driver for the HP LaserJet 4250, PCL6 and PostScript,
running off a USB port. Printing is immensely slow, and it goes a page
at a time, with 45 seconds-to-a-minute between pages. On my previous
machine, also XP, printing (with the spooler) was immediate and pages
came out one right after the other.

I have worked through the Troubleshooter, and:

I am printing to a local printer;
I have 670 Gb of storage, so I'm not low on disk space.
I have 2 Gb of memory, so I'm not low on memory.
The printing is slow whether using the spooler or not.
The hard disk has been defragmented.

The Troubleshooter is out of ideas, and so am I. Does anyone have any
further ideas?

 

[guestuser]

I just got a Dell workstation (Precision 670, Windows XP SP2, and installed
the driver for the HP LaserJet 4250, PCL6 and PostScript, running off a USB
port. Printing is immensely slow, and it goes a page at a time, with 45
seconds-to-a-minute between pages. On my previous machine, also XP,
printing (with the spooler) was immediate and pages came out one right
after the other.

I have worked through the Troubleshooter, and:

I am printing to a local printer;
I have 670 Gb of storage, so I'm not low on disk space.
I have 2 Gb of memory, so I'm not low on memory.
The printing is slow whether using the spooler or not.
The hard disk has been defragmented.

The Troubleshooter is out of ideas, and so am I. Does anyone have any
further ideas?

I would try the installation of the printer again. Uninstall it completely,
first. Reboot your machine. Install the HP LaserJet 4250, following the HP
installation instructions to the letter. Good luck!

 

[Philip Andrews]

Hello,

This sort of problem is usually caused by a driver problem. Have you
tried downloading and install the latest driver from the HP site?

Philip

 

[Jonathan K. Cohen]

I have reinstalled the drivers from HP, with no improvement. I'm going
to try switching the printer from USB to parallel. Maybe that will help.

Jonathan

 

[Jonathan K. Cohen]

Switching from the USB port to the parallel port worked. Printing is
once again instantaneous.

 

[q_q_anonymous]

Switching from the USB port to the parallel port worked. Printing is
once again instantaneous.

If you wanted to investigate further, it might be worth trying an
external drive(or internal with usb-ide adaptor), see if the speed is
v. slow from that USB port. (rules out a printer driver problem)