Any possible way to sort this Print Spooling out?

[WeatherMan]

Hi people,

Heres the story.

What I was doing up till a few hours ago was printing stuff from my network, via the windows print sharing service.

Was connecting to the dell downstairs and using its all-in-one printer, the problem is that I usually print enlarged screenshots for posters and stuff, and its takes masses of ram, Im talking 5000 x 4000 resolution prints, around 30 pages at maximum dpi, which takes up around 1.6GB ram each time.

Well, the dell downstairs has like 256MB ram, and as you would expect copes like shit.

I decided to put the printer on my home network via ethernet an connect it to my router.

The printer is now installed on my system as a network feature (via HP Installation Software)

The problem I have though is that, I go to print, it uses all my ram, then loads all the spooling data to disk (or the printers spool mem)
What happens is that it loads it over at like 3MBPS which takes about a minute to complete, during this time all my pages are in ram and cannot be printed.

So, just to print out my screenshot I have to spend about a minute waiting for the pages to spool, then wait another 5 for the spool data to get transfered to disk

and THEN they finally start printing!

I was wondering if there was any way I could make it that all this spool data doesn't get transferred into ram, as this ****s up my system and also takes ages to recover / transfer the data to a drive.

Thanks

 

[PC Hobbyist]

Maybe some of these ideas will help

A couple of things came to mind as I was reading your post. I don't know how much this will help, though.

1. In a network, the type of security encryption you have can make a difference as to how long the data transfer between the two computers in your home will take. The higher the level of encryption, the safer the transfer, but it will of course take longer.

2. Just as a thought, I wonder if you could create a virtual RAM drive from part of a hard drive that has space to share. Maybe that might help - not sure, though. If you don't know how to do that, I recommend googling it to find programs that will help you or maybe ask in another section of this forum. But, first find out if the idea is worth trying.

3. I believe there are ways to skip some or all of the spooling process, but here again, I am going off of what I think I read somewhere. You might need to find out the pros and cons of that if it is possible.

So, I don't know if any one of these will help you a lot, but maybe a combination of these will show a noticeable difference. Check into that. My knowledge is not good enough in those areas to be able to give you more detailed information. Good luck.