Why are print jobs so large?

[shawn]

I have an 1.9Ghz here in the office with 1GB ram, a tiny hard drive with a
few gigs of room free.

We have network printers, but attached to my computer is an Epson Color
photo printer also.

Today I made some 8.5" x 11" photos.

There's 5 of them. On disk they're each about 7MB file size, so that's about
35MB total.

When looking in the print spooler it's spooling about 840MB! They took me
about 30 minutes to print, made my computer slow so I couldn't do other
work.

Why is this so? Is that just how the printer language is because a JPG is
compressed and printer language is not?

 

[LVTravel]

I have an 1.9Ghz here in the office with 1GB ram, a tiny hard drive with a
few gigs of room free.

We have network printers, but attached to my computer is an Epson Color
photo printer also.

Today I made some 8.5" x 11" photos.

There's 5 of them. On disk they're each about 7MB file size, so that's
about 35MB total.

When looking in the print spooler it's spooling about 840MB! They took me
about 30 minutes to print, made my computer slow so I couldn't do other
work.

Why is this so? Is that just how the printer language is because a JPG is
compressed and printer language is not?

Think the number of dots and the number of colors being sent to the printer.
Each nozzle on the printer is getting a stream of information (and Epson
printers have many nozzles) as the print head moves back and forth. All
that information is broken out of the .jpg file by the program and printer
driver and stored in the printer spooler. Unlike a laser printer where the
entire image is sent to the printer quickly and then flushes out the
spooler, the spooler has to send just enough information to the ink jet
printer to keep it's "nozzles" filled.

While your .jpg or other image is being stored in 7 MB at 300 dpi. when you
are printing it your printed resolution may be up to 5760 x 1440 dpi,
depending on your printer, and all the data has to be created and stored
before it can be printed.

Strongly suggest when you are printing with the computer setup you have now,
just print one picture at a time, allow it to finish before attempting
another. If your spooler runs out of memory or the computer is attempting
to enlarge the page file on your limited hard drive then it could crash
easily.

 

[shawn]

Thanks very muich. That was a great explanation.

I do see that printing one page at a time is faster.

Even printing 5 copies of the same page slows me down.

Is there a way to increase the speed or performance of the spooler?

Our office is looking into new computers (at least they said so). When I
move up to a Dual Core processor and 2GB or 3GB memory as opposed to the
single core 1.9Ghz and 1GB I have now will that help?

 

[LVTravel]

Thanks very muich. That was a great explanation.

I do see that printing one page at a time is faster.

Even printing 5 copies of the same page slows me down.

Is there a way to increase the speed or performance of the spooler?

Our office is looking into new computers (at least they said so). When I
move up to a Dual Core processor and 2GB or 3GB memory as opposed to the
single core 1.9Ghz and 1GB I have now will that help?

Remember that the memory (that is what stores the print image just before it
is put to paper) is much less inside an ink jet printer than in an
equivalent laser printer and is always printed line by line instead of a
whole page at a time. An ink jet print job for more than one copy is
normally spooled repeatedly to the spooler and doesn't spool once and print
multiple times from the one page spooled. Hope that makes sense to you as I
was just rambling on...... As for speeding up the spooler or print job, the
only thing there you could do is to increase the priority of the spooler
(giving the spooler more processor cycles out of the fixed number that it
can perform) but then the computer trying to accomplish another task would
bog down. Simply typing in Word would be a chore.

Another slowdown you may be experiencing is the small hard drive. Try to
ensure that you have as much free space as you can on the hard drive by
moving to a USB drive or CD any data files that aren't used frequently.
Once that has been done and your temporary internet files deleted and
recycle bin has been emptied, defragment your hard drive. If you have less
than 15% free space on the drive you won't get a good defragment if at all.
Windows just doesn't like to operate with just a little expansion room on
the hard drive.