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Snow Leopard - Slow Network Printing

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Stoic Joker:
Greetings
    Okay Joker's asking a Mac Question, and yes you're all allowed to laugh at me for it... ;)

Here's the deal:
    Customer bought a refurbished HP Color LaserJet 3800n from the company I work for. It has been throughly checked out & performs flawlessly on a Windows network... However. The customer has an Apple AirPort WiFi network with two OSX 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) laptops. Being a "network" install, I got roped into doing the setup. Fortunately, I've been futzing with Linux quite a bit here lately so I wasn't completely lost on the install (I used the HP JetDirect/socket option, which both Apple & HP support pages state is the correct option).

    The printer works, sending a Word document, in a reasonably normal period of time. But. Trying to send a picture (1.4MB .jpg) from Adobe PhotoShop (or the Mac picture viewer) takes roughly half an hour (this is not an exaggeration). My Win7 machine at the office will print the same image to the same printer in 15 seconds.

    I'm guessing at this point this is an Apple issue - Googling brings up several (hundred) hits that also imply that this is the case. However there is absolutely no consensus on what the cause/solution might be. ...And I'm not real comfortable just having-a-go at the machine for fear of screwing it up.

    So, does anyone have any (preferably first hand but I'll take what I can get...) insight into what may be going on? I'm reasonably sure that it is not a network performance issue, and (at this point) that the problem lies with the Mac. What I don't know is what (if anything) can be done about it.


Side Note: When the customer connected the printer to their Mac via USB it printed fine (which I'm guessing gets Adobe off the hook). It is only the network printing performance that is suffering (horribly...). However being that this is a laptop, a USB connection is not an acceptable permanent solution.

Darwin:
Okay Joker's asking a Mac Question, and yes you're all allowed to laugh at me for it... ;)-Stoic Joker (January 17, 2010, 12:10 PM)
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Sorry, couldn't resist...  :-[

Stoic Joker:
Fair enough... (I did ask for it) :)

Carol Haynes:
I have read of quite a few situations where Apple WiFi network speeds have been really bad (and not just for printers) so it could be the WiFi connection itself. What happens if you use an ethernet cable to connect to the router where the printer is connected?

Failing that it could be the HP driver - I have a love/hate relationship with HP software (mostly I love to hate it) which is flaky and annoying at the best of times!

Try downloading and installing a different version (try the latest build if you haven't already, if you already have the latest build try reverting to an earlier build).

Stoic Joker:
I have read of quite a few situations where Apple WiFi network speeds have been really bad (and not just for printers) so it could be the WiFi connection itself. What happens if you use an ethernet cable to connect to the router where the printer is connected?-Carol Haynes (January 18, 2010, 07:09 AM)
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Ethernet cable wasn't an option. But the network speed appeared to be ok (best I could tell on a Mac). The user ran an internet speed check (across the WiFi) and came up with a solid 16/5Mb rate... Sure it ain't LAN speeds, but it's certainly fast enough to get a print job transfered in less than a half hour.

Failing that it could be the HP driver - I have a love/hate relationship with HP software (mostly I love to hate it) which is flaky and annoying at the best of times!
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Me too! :)

Try downloading and installing a different version (try the latest build if you haven't already, if you already have the latest build try reverting to an earlier build).
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Chalk another one up for Mac-tastic nightmares ... there is no other option. HP says to use the Universal Print Driver that comes with 10.6.2. (and gives no other option)

Apple (kind of) admits there is an issue with Snow Leopard's network printing ... but says nothing clear on what if any fix there is.

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