[printerpip]

Hi all, I find my self before you all today asking this question after a week and half of pulling my hair out.

I’ll start from the beginning as its always a good place to start. We have a Xerox Docucenter print/copier which was connected to a Windows NT4 Server box speced with a 1 Gig processor, 256 meg of ram and a 20 gig hard disk running MS Office XP. We have installed on this box a piece of software which was custom designed to batch print word and excel documents in a specific order which would create a pack of documents. The custom software was created using Omnis Studio.

Each document has its own specific printing requirements which are setup though the custom software i.e.:- double sided or single side and stapled at the top and so on. To achieve this we created a printer for each instance. So when you look at the printers installed on the box there is around about 14 printers each setup and labeled for a specific printing task.

Now for the problem.

Since the box is nearing 7 year of age it’s becoming a little buggy so I thought an upgrade was in order. I ordered a new pc with a considerable higher spec (2.4 gig Processor, 1 gig of ram shared with the graphics card and a 140 gig hard disk) running MS Windows XP and Office XP

After a little time spent installing all the print drivers (using MS drivers as the Xerox one didn't want to play with the printer) and software we had a fully working setup.

Well that’s what I thought until I noticed some documents were been printed in the wrong order. After a little thought I have come to the conclusion that this is happening because some jobs are finishing spooling faster than others in the multiple print queues (14 individual printers each unique) which all aim to the same printer. By upgrading the PC I have shot my self in the foot because the new machine is printing the documents too fast where as the old NT4 work horse was slow enough to give each document sufficient time to be printed and spooled to the printer be for printing the next document. I have played around with the advanced Tab in the properties section of the print driver where you can specify to “Start printing after last page is spooled” and so on but with no joy as each option still gives the same problem.


Now that I have explained my situation my question is: Is there away to make windows, MS Word & Excel or even Omnis Studio pause between print printing documents or even slow the process down?

Kind Regards

Ben

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the real issue is that our trying to use windows xp as a print server. Your correct in that the the print jobs are printing in the order of spooling.

you would find that a straight install of Windows server 2003 configured as a print server (you can even use the existing system) would provide a much better result.

[starjax]

the real issue is that our trying to use windows xp as a print server. Your correct in that the the print jobs are printing in the order of spooling.

you would find that a straight install of Windows server 2003 configured as a print server (you can even use the existing system) would provide a much better result.