16 Bit Printing

[Guest]

I hav e a 16 bit printing scenario that I need some help on. Here's the deal:

We have a Win2003 AD network with XP clients. My print server is running
Win2003. Our printers are HP Laserjets (different models) and we use PCL5.
All printers have JetDirects which are the shared off my 2003 Print Server.

My workstations run XP Pro SP1.

We use an older app that happens to be 16 bit. Sometimes, printing in the
old app no longer works. We have no idea why it stops, it just does. When
it stops, I am forced to go to my print server and restart the print spooler.
Then everything starts working again.

During the last outage, I wanted to test out 16 bit printing from both the
workstation and the server. I ran SYSEDIT and tried to print out one of my
config files. Both attempts failed.

I restarted the spooler and everything started working again. Why does it
stop? How can I fix this problem permanently? If not, is there any
condition that I can monitor for on the server that could detect the problem
and correct it by restarting the spooler service?

 

[L]

I hav e a 16 bit printing scenario that I need some help on. Here's
the deal:

We have a Win2003 AD network with XP clients. My print server is
running Win2003. Our printers are HP Laserjets (different models) and
we use PCL5. All printers have JetDirects which are the shared off my
2003 Print Server.

My workstations run XP Pro SP1.

We use an older app that happens to be 16 bit. Sometimes, printing in
the old app no longer works. We have no idea why it stops, it just
does. When it stops, I am forced to go to my print server and restart
the print spooler.
Then everything starts working again.

During the last outage, I wanted to test out 16 bit printing from both
the workstation and the server. I ran SYSEDIT and tried to print out
one of my config files. Both attempts failed.

I restarted the spooler and everything started working again. Why
does it stop? How can I fix this problem permanently? If not, is
there any condition that I can monitor for on the server that could
detect the problem and correct it by restarting the spooler service?

I've never had to fix this myself, but there are some help files within
Windows Server that may be of help. One of the printer topics talks about
"print processor" options. In most cases, winraw works fine as a print
processor but the help topic discusses several other print processor
options that can be chosen to ensure compatibility with older
applications. Basically, you would create a queue just for printing from
the old application and select the more compatible print processor
setting from within the queue's properties.