Delays and pauses printing direct to printer in WIN XP MS-DOS

[Edward]

While printing to local Epson LQ2180 dot matrix printer on
LPT1 in Windows XP Home Edition, using DOS program started
from command.com prompt, there are delays before printing
starts. Upon making entries into DOS accounting system
there is a significant delay before printing after
accepting each entry. Have set "print direct to printer"
but printing does not go direct to printer but comes out
after a significant pause. In a few cases small reports
appear to have been lost. The same printer and DOS
program applications worked fine under Windows 98. Does
anyone know how to resolve this problem? What settings to
change?

 

[Davide Guolo]

Edward,

there are delays before printing starts.

Maybe your DOS software is not closing the printer port after the end of the
print job.
In this case Windows will wait for a timeout value before to print the job.

Regards,
Davide Guolo

 

[Edward]

I understand where DOS may not close the printer port.
This printer worked properly under Windows 98 and direct
to printer; where documents would print immediately and
there was no delays or pauses. Obviously XP is handling
the printer/driver differently. One would think that if
DOS did not close the printer, the XP driver should leave
control of the printer to the DOS application program and
printing would remain immediate from the DOS application
until such time that the DOS program did close the port.

Thanks for your reply.

Any ideas on what could be changed to make it work
correctly under XP?

 

[Edward]

As an after thought I would like to note that I don't have
the source code and cannot change the DOS accounting
application as it was purchased from a well known vendor,
who no longer supports the DOS version of the product.
And while I would like to upgrade to a Windows version of
the product it's not my final decision. So at this time
that is not an option either. It seems that Windows XP
should have its printer driver operate the same as the
drivers under Windows 98 SE.

 

[Davide Guolo]

Edward,

Any ideas on what could be changed to make it work
correctly under XP?

This is a solution I found on the net.
Please note I HAVEN'T TESTED IT.
In particular way, take care using RegEdit: it could be rather dangerous.

1) in REGEDIT ( START->RUN-> REGEDIT )
click : Hkey_local_machine
then click : System
then click : CurrentControlSet
then click : Control
somewhere at the bottom of the control list Click: WOW
in LPT_timeout property change it to 3

2) Go to SYSTEM.INI file
in [386enh] section search [Network] if it does not exist enter the
following :

[Network]
PrintBufTime=10
[IFSMGR]
PrintBufTime=10

This should set the timeout to 10 seconds. Do not set too low the value or
the printer could start printing before the end of the DOS print job.

Anyway, if your DOS app. can print to a file, I suggest you use Printfil to
send it to the Windows printer. (Even if it cannot, you could capture the
LPT output)

Regards,
Davide