Silly problem when use the printer

[oops]

hey,

I got one problem.

My buddy moved in as my housemate, and he brought his notebook and a old printer. We've set up a network with a DSL router. Because his notebook doesn't have a paralle port, so we plug that old printer onto my system, so he can print things by sending information to the printer through my system

This system is pretty goo
[email protected]
512MB Corsair DDR PC3200@190FSB
120GB 8MB cache WD SE HD
Geforce4 Ti4200 3.5ns version


AND......

the problem happens like that

when i was playing Firearms, my fps is 100fps all the time no matter what. But suddenly when my buddy started printing things from his system, my fps drop to 10 something like that. I couldn't even move with that kind of laggy!

And then the next time when we print things, I checked CPU useage from MBM5. Guess what?? It shows 100% CPU useage!!

What the heck?? Does it really require that much CPU power when use one old printer??

I don't really think so. I think there must be some kind of problem.

So i need help, whoever knows about this please help.

thanks

 

[Krieger]

you could invest in a stand alone print server, I think netgear makes a small one that could fit in the palm of your hand that cost something like $30, you could plug it into the netowrk and problem solved... other than that your stuck. I've seen that happen on my dad's netowrk dozens of times.

 

[RoadWarrior]

Some cheap inkjets move all the image processing load etc into the driver of the printer, no smarts in the printer. If you have one of those, it will load the CPU down when you print.

 

[oops]

Some cheap inkjets move all the image processing load etc into the driver of the printer, no smarts in the printer. If you have one of those, it will load the CPU down when you print.

My buddy's printer is one really old one, about 4 years old I think. But he was just printing some essaies with black ink only, that's not much of the data at all, beside my computer is powerful enough to show me 600fps in UT, how come it cannot handle such small amount of Word data?

 

[oops]

you could invest in a stand alone print server, I think netgear makes a small one that could fit in the palm of your hand that cost something like $30, you could plug it into the netowrk and problem solved... other than that your stuck. I've seen that happen on my dad's netowrk dozens of times.

It doesn't worth to spend anything on that old printer. Besides it's not mine.

 

[FTC]

oops,

Make sure you have your paralell port configured as 'bidirectional' or 'enhanced paralell port', (through BIOS), and that you have a good quality paralell cable and that your paralell port is using a system interrupt.... this way your printer will report back status
through interrupt usage and the op. system will not need to poll it, which is something very resource-consuming.
Besides this, there is not much you can do.

Regards
FTC

 

[RoadWarrior]

Oh, you could try and get the printer port to use a DMA, as an ECP parallel port, theoretically, there is no CPU load then.

Road Warrior

edit: or you could tell him to get a USB to parallel adapter, they do exist, and I think they can be got fairly cheap.

 

[oops]

So, you mean it's normal to happen something like that when you use a parallel printer on a powerful system?

 

[RoadWarrior]

That's why they call them legacy devices, 'coz they are old tech that slows down modern parts. Mind you, USB is no improvement, not sure if USB 2.0 uses DMA or not but the first one sucks.

 

[JigPu]

Yeah, all my parallel printers slow my systems WAY down. I haven't checked wether this USB printer slows me down or not yet though. Gotta try that.....

JigPu

 

[oops]

thanks everyone

Now we can do nothing about this, but at least now we know what caused that extreme preformance in game when printing.