[Yr7-10it] Re: [Technical] Help Request - XP+Office extreme slowness

[Roland GESTHUIZEN]

Interesting point .. last year I had a hellish time trying to print a complicated four page MS Word doc by a teacher. The printer struggled, coughed and waited before tgiving us an incomplete printout (new printer with oodles of RAM). 

As an afterthought, I later created a PDF as Con suggested below and it printed like a dream from within the Adobe Acrobat reader.  I also did this for a staff member with a mail merge that kept failing, printing instead directly from the PDF.

There must be a lot of bloated printer instructions that get stripped out when a postscript based PDF file is created. 

Print to PDF is a life saving option to have at hand.

Regards Roland

-----Original Message-----
From: Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au>
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List <tech at edulists.com.au>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:21:10 +1100
Subject: [Yr7-10it] Re: [Technical] Help Request - XP+Office extreme slowness

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 10:08:48AM +1100, Keith Richardson wrote:
> Hi Everyone.
> We are frustrated here because our beautiful new XP machines are slowing
> down whenever we are in MS-Office (as explained below).
> Any suggestions or solutions will be greatfully received! (Changing to
> Openoffice is not a possibility, Con.)

Don't sweat it Keith ;-) I wouldn't normally suggest a wholesale change
office suite change without long-term planning.

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

What does Microsoft support say?

Can I get you to try one thing which may allow you to bypass the problem 
while you seek a full solution?

Can you download and isntall PDFCreator
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) and generate PDFs of all the
documents you are trying to print, then use Acrobat Reader to print them?  

Yes, it's a pain, but will take less time than the 3 minutes you currently 
suffer ;-)

Cheers,

Con Zymaris

- CEO, Cybersource Pty. Ltd.
- Director, Open Source Industry Australia, Limited.
- Convenor, Open Source Victoria (A Government-funded industry cluster.)

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477


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