I am having problems with a customer in regards to printing within their workgroup. Their setup is as follows:

They have 3 computers in the office with the computer named “back” acting as the server. It has it’s own printer which is an HP 4000. There are no problems in this area. The other two computers are named “middle” and “front” and they share an HP 4050 which is connected to “middle”. The two computers, front and middle, are both sending documents to the printer attached to middle. The computer “front” has 32 MB RAM and the computer “middle” has 128 MB RAM. These documents are tax forms that are printed from a DOS-based program. I am having two {2} problems with this setup, the first being the most severe.

The first problem is that when front sends a print job to the printer attached to middle it will only print the first page. If you look at the window/screen on the printer you can see it flashing “data received” and you have to press the “Go” button to get the printer to print the rest of the print job. When I went to the "Printer’s folder" on the front computer, I added the HP 4050 printer, it prints to a Virtual LPT, the box for “print from DOS-based programs” was checked, correct UNC was entered by browsing {\\middle\hp}, and a test page was successfully printed. The computer “middle” which has the printer physically attached has no problem printing. This particular printer prints about 200,000 pages during the height of tax season so I need to solve this problem as quickly as possible.

The second problem also concerns the “front” computer. It seems to “freeze up” about 25% of the time when a print job is being sent to the printer. In order to solve the problem, he must close out his DOS-based tax software and start the process over. I have wondered if this could be a result of having insufficient RAM. Someone else has mentioned that it could be because DOS does not want to “give up” the printer and that this happens when both the front and middle computers send a print job to the printer at the same time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as tax time is drawing near!

Jeff Farrar
[email protected]




[This message has been edited by farrar (edited January 15, 2001).]