[Technical] Help Request - XP+Office extreme slowness

[Clark, Ian C]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au 
> We have Novell servers with plain old boring print queues 
> installed and only Administrators have more than just print 
> to rights to these print queues and printers. On the 
> workstations that  we have XP Professional installed with 
> either Office 2000 or Office 2003 where this probem exists, 
> when a user tries to print or change the page format in Word 
> / Excel etc the PC takes a very long time (upto 3 minutes) to 
> respond and then states that the printer is not responding do 
> You wish to wait or continue regardless?for both.

Hi Keith,

To make it easier to diagnose, you need to remove factors from the
problem. One is the Novell print queues.

To do that, delete the printer on a test workstation, and install one of
your network printers, printing to it directly rather than going through
your server ... E.g. in the Add Printers wizard, choose a Local printer
(means the spooling happens on the workstation's own hard disk), create
a TCP/IP port for the printer (putting in the printer's address), choose
the right driver, and print first a test page, then a notepad document,
then an Office document. 

The results of these tests guide what you do next.

> I have also seen this on one PC connected directly to the 
> printer via LPT when the printer is in standby / powersave mode.

This is probably a separate issue. If the Default Printer is not
available when the app starts up, this can cause a delay, because the
page is actually rendered to your screen using that printer's driver.

Cheers,
Clarky


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