Got a question I hope someone can answer soon. I have an old series II hp laserjet. Im trying to print a roster for my kid's football teams. I have the roster typed up the way I want it in Word (xp) and I have put an image behind the text ( a Raiders Pirate) anyway when I print it out I get half a page then some upright dashes an error occurs. I hit reset button and it prints the other half of the page. Now I think its a RAM problem so i set it to 150x150 dots per inch and it prints the page, But the quality is unacceptable. Im thinking that the image is to much for the old printer. The system RAM on the printer says it has 1536KB and the document is 173KB so i don't get it. But I suspect thats the problem it could be an internal printer setting. Anyone have any ideas? Can't I spool the data off of system RAM on my machine rather than the printer? It seems like I remember something about this , but I can't remember right now. Anyway, first game is tommorrow so any help would be appreciated.

Variable

Here's all I know (there are some holes):

When you print, the program you are printing from sends directions to the printer driver telling it what it wants to print. The printer driver figures out how to put the (literally) millions of dots on the page you are printing, then feeds this info to the print spooler. Even for simple documents, the spooler file may be several megabytes. For complicated full resolution pictures, the spooler file may be hundreds of megabytes.

I might be wrong, but I think I had a similar problem once. Windows uses disk cache for the print spooler. It behooves you to keep a gigabyte or so of free space on C: drive if you plan on printing complicated stuff.

Like I said, this is what I remember and I am old enough that my memory is not always accurate. Use this information with that in mind and at your own risk.

Problem is that a 173K Word file gets a LOT bigger when spooled for printing.

One thing that might be worth trying is to go to Control Panel>Printers.
Select the printer,right click and select properties. Under the advanced tab select the option Print directly to the printer.

Not certain if it will work, but no harm if it doesn't.

David