Printing Problem

[Dick Reuben]

Running XP Home, SP2, with 512 mem.
I use a laser and Epson jet printers. When I'm printing muliple pages
on the Epson, I like to kill time by playing games. If I choose a
DOS-based game the printer almost stops---no problem wih the laser.

My guess is that the reason is the Epson has no memory. I've tried
changing the setup to print "direcly to the printer".

Is there some kind of buffer that I can get to eliminate the problem?

 

[Vanguard]

Running XP Home, SP2, with 512 mem.
I use a laser and Epson jet printers. When I'm printing muliple pages
on the Epson, I like to kill time by playing games. If I choose a
DOS-based game the printer almost stops---no problem wih the laser.

My guess is that the reason is the Epson has no memory. I've tried
changing the setup to print "direcly to the printer".

Is there some kind of buffer that I can get to eliminate the problem?

Your Epson inkjet doesn't have any memory. Your laser printer does have
memory so it can buffer up some of the print spool output (perhaps all
of your document). DOS games are *not* designed for a cooperative task
environment. They want all resources. So don't play DOS-based games
when printing to your Epson, or play Windows-based games although many
can still suck up so many resources as to cripple your system for other
tasks, or the game won't play well, like being jerky, because the other
tasks are still getting a portion of the CPU's cycles.

 

[Manny Borges]

Dos game don't have to be designed to play well with others.

They DO in windows XP beause the process that governs them (the NTVDM) is a
separate thread that can be pre-emptively multitasked per DOS app.

How old is the Epson?

It sounds like the driver is launching its own NTVDM and WOW components.
That would cause a performance dip on the printer.

There are ways to monkey with the DOS PIFs but I would first lok for a new
win32 driver for the Epson printer.