Oldish laser printer + newish PC = only prints sometimes. Please help me fix it.

Okay, I hate inkjet printers. So I’m desperate to make my 11-year-old LaserWriter II-NT printer work with my 2-year-old Dell Dimension XPS T450 PC.

The arrangement works okay with relatively small, simple documents – say 30 KB Word docs. The printer takes a while to gobble down all the data the PC sends it, but once it does, it prints fine.

The problem is bigger documents. I watch the Printer Monitor as all the data slowly a gets sent to the printer; and the green LED is happily blinking on and off during this process. When all the data’s been sent, the Printer Monitor disappears, the blinking LED stays lit but stops blinking, and…

nothing prints.

I assume the printer has choked on more data than it can handle, so it just sits there.

So, PC Geeks, what’s a intermediate-level home computer owner (me) to do??? Have I set the printer up wrong? Or the computer? Or is this one of those unfixable cases of an obsolete printer never being completely compatible with a new PC?

Can I modify (upgrade?) the printer to get it to work better? Or, as a last-ditch fix, can I shrink (compress?) the documents (mostly Acrobat ones so far) so that the printer can more readily digest them?

Questions, questions. So many questions. Please help.

I am not directly familar with your printer but using old laserjets of similar age as a reference, short of adding more RAM to the printer there is little you can do if the problem is in individual page conplexity.

It’s been a while since I fooled around with page memory issues as modern lasers of the few years can hold lots of cheap buffer RAM but IIRC the laser’s internal buffer hardware must be able to form a complete image of the page before it can render and print it. In the case of complex acrobat documents might well overwhelm the printer’s internal buffer and PDF docs have even occasionally caused my 600 DPI Laserjet 5P with 18 megs of RAM to wheeze.

Two technical modifications you can try, if your driver applet supports them, that will help it not to choke on larger docs are:

1: Print the documents as a “raster” vs a “vector” image. This takes longer (often a lot longer) but doing this is not as buffer RAM intensive and a large doc has a better chance of printing.

2: Reduce the resolution. Yeah I know it’s a “well Duh!”

3: You didn’t say what version of windows you were using. The Win 98 and millenium built in printer driver applets are very basic. Installing a manufacturer driver applet (even if it was originally for an older OS like Win 95 ) might give you a little more tweak control and better rendering.

4: If you are actually making the docs it may help to use as many internal resident Laserwriter fonts as possible as this will decrease the printer memory workload. Having said this I don’t know if this will help given the way Windows 98/ME uses and interacts with it’s TTF engine.

5: If the file is large, not because of individual page complexity, but simply due to the number of pages you can play around with your printer “spool” settings.

Good Luck!

As astro says, the printer does build the whole page before printing, so the real fix is to add RAM - if your printer takes more and you can find the compatible parts. A new driver would help too. Look here for the search results I got.

One possible workaround, if the document allows it, is to select and copy the text into a word processor. It may print from there as is, or you could try changing it all to some font that’s built into the printer. (You might not be able to copy; Acrobat allows the creator of a document to set security on various actions, or the document might even be a series of images instead of text. I have a facsimile of an old book that’s nothing but page images.)

It appears that the printer is not RAM expandable [big-ass frowny here].

But these are great suggestions. Any other ideas?

BUMP!

Based on this link re the pdf images it looks like you’re screwed either way. Getting a new laser is my best reccommendation. They’re not that expensive and you can get a nice HP for 400- 600 or a good used for $ 200 or so but, with the exception of newish refurbs, I am somewhat wary of used lasers re the potential wear and tear issue.

http://www.interactivepages.com/macfreak/usedIINTgoodchoice.html