do you setup to "spool" or "print direct?"

[jmaister]

G'day,

stumble upon this topic today, changed the setting in print driver to print direct as I thought "wth is all the print memory there for."

Reason for taking this action is also because server's spooler seemed not functioning correctly and kept sending out ghost jobs.


So far, the falcon4 and saturn reacted much faster, jobs came out one after another with almost no processing time.


anyone else tried?

Spooler exist in Windows OS, IMHO, is catered toward pancake size printer with little to no memory. With commercial big boys that we look after, I dont think the feature needed to be enabled.

I'm for "print directly"


cheers






edit: printer properties>advanced>spooler or print direct.

you can get to the "printer spooler" by running "services.msc"

[TheOwl]

Re: do you setup to "spool" or "print direct?"

There are two trains of thought on this topic that spell everything out.

1. Printing directly to a printer is faster as the print job does not have to go to the print via another server. This is good for production type equipment where there are low numbers of people printing to the device.

2. Printing via a print share on a server enables a single point for driver administration. Make changes to the driver on the server and this will filter down to the client PC. You can also setup things like scripts of GPO's to automatically install the print onto the client PC. This method is good for larger networks.

Now, this used to be true with older equipment and I haven't heard that it is changed, but if someone could correct me if I am wrong here. Printing via LPR has a connection limit of 8 connections. If 9 people press print at once, one of the print jobs will get dropped, or the NIC will fall off the network. If you are printing directly to a printer, then make sure that you use RAW 9100 as your print port to get around the LPR connection limit.

Basically I use a rule of thumb that if a network has more than 8 users, then I will share the printer from a server of some sort, other wise print directly. It all comes down to if you can be bothered installing a print driver on each individual client PC, or if you want to install the driver once on the server and then just connect the clients to that share.