Slow printing problem - help!
Adele Gabriel
I am new to the group and thought you all might be able to help to
resolve a printing problem I am having with the SCO 5.0 Open Server.
We are a retail grocery store running BASS (Retail Bass Exchange)RBX
software on SCO 5.0 . We recently upgraded from AT&T UNIX. That
server was a 486 with 32 megs of RAM. Our new server is a Pentium II 450
with 128 megs of RAM. However after upgrading, my laser printer
(connected via parallel port) is running half as fast as the old
system. Serial connected line printers are fine.
My software vendor is telling me that the problem is in SCO (the OS)
not their software. They also say that SCO has acknowledged this fact.
Has anyone else had this problem, or does this make sense? Or is my
software vendor leading me astray?
Advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks
John.
Pat Welch
There are several possibilities, ranging from wrong or conflicting IRQ's
to parallel ports operating in polled mode to an old parallel card
brought over from the old system.
Search the TA's on sco.com using "parallel" as the key word.
Also ID the exact version of SCO you have, as some of the possibilities
are related to the exact version of Openserver you have. (uname -X)
And give us an exact list of the boards in the PC.
--
---------------------------------------------
Pat Welch, UBB Computer Services
SCO Authorized Reseller
Unix/Hardware/BB Sales & Support
Year 2000: Consulting and Repairs
** 155 Days left 'til 1/1/2000 **
(209) 745-1401 Fax: (209) 745-5640
Nationwide pager: (800) 608-7122
E-mail: pat...@inreach.com
----------------------------------------------
Tony Lawrence
> (connected via parallel port) is running half as fast as the old
> system. Serial connected line printers are fine.
> My software vendor is telling me that the problem is in SCO (the OS)
> not their software. They also say that SCO has acknowledged this fact.
> Has anyone else had this problem, or does this make sense? Or is my
> software vendor leading me astray?
Well, they aren't telling you the whole truth. They are
correct in that it is not their software.
What you probably have is a hardware problem. Your parallel
port isn't functioning correctly; specifically it isn't
generating interrupts when it should, and this causes the
SCO driver to run slower. SCO does, in fact "acknowledge"
this, much in the same way that you would acknowledge that
an accident between two other vehicles caused a traffic jam
that caused you to be late for work because you had to take
back roads to avoid the mess.
If you got to http://www.sco.com/ta and type in "slow
parallel", you'll get 20 or so hits related to this issue,
but you'll also see that none of them are particularly
recent, and most basically say what I've said in the first
paragraph.
"man parallel" on your own system explains how to monitor
parallel port activity with "crash" and what you can do if
you can't fix the hardware (which is what you probably
should do).
--
Tony Lawrence (to...@aplawrence.com)
SCO articles, help, book reviews, tests,
job listings and more : http://www.aplawrence.com
TelusPlanet
IEEE cable (not to long)
BIOS setup (try various settings) ECP, EPP, Normal, etc.
Printer & Cable (make sure its not running slow on other machines)
If all else fails...get a cheap print server like the DP 300 by Dlink and a
100Mb NIC.
Adele Gabriel <gabr...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:37A12F0...@worldnet.att.net...
> Greetings all,
> I am new to the group and thought you all might be able to help to
> resolve a printing problem I am having with the SCO 5.0 Open Server.
>
> We are a retail grocery store running BASS (Retail Bass Exchange)RBX
> software on SCO 5.0 . We recently upgraded from AT&T UNIX. That
> server was a 486 with 32 megs of RAM. Our new server is a Pentium II 450
> with 128 megs of RAM. However after upgrading, my laser printer
> (connected via parallel port) is running half as fast as the old
> system. Serial connected line printers are fine.
> My software vendor is telling me that the problem is in SCO (the OS)
> not their software. They also say that SCO has acknowledged this fact.
> Has anyone else had this problem, or does this make sense? Or is my
> software vendor leading me astray?
>