How do I slow down or create a pause between MS Word Jobs been printed?

Hi all, I find my self before you all today asking this question after a week and half of pulling my hair out.

I’ll start from the beginning as its always a good place to start. We have a Xerox Docucenter print/copier which was connected to a Windows NT4 Server box speced with a 1 Gig processor, 256 meg of ram and a 20 gig hard disk running MS Office XP. We have installed on this box a piece of software which was custom designed to batch print word and excel documents in a specific order which would create a pack of documents. The custom software was created using Omnis Studio.

Each document has its own specific printing requirements which are setup though the custom software i.e.:- double sided or single side and stapled at the top and so on. To achieve this we created a printer for each instance. So when you look at the printers installed on the box there is around about 14 printers each setup and labeled for a specific printing task.

Now for the problem.

Since the box is nearing 7 year of age it’s becoming a little buggy so I thought an upgrade was in order. I ordered a new pc with a considerable higher spec (2.4 gig Processor, 1 gig of ram shared with the graphics card and a 140 gig hard disk) running MS Windows XP and Office XP

After a little time spent installing all the print drivers (using MS drivers as the Xerox one didn't want to play with the printer) and software we had a fully working setup.

Well that’s what I thought until I noticed some documents were been printed in the wrong order. After a little thought I have come to the conclusion that this is happening because some jobs are finishing spooling faster than others in the multiple print queues (14 individual printers each unique) which all aim to the same printer. By upgrading the PC I have shot my self in the foot because the new machine is printing the documents too fast where as the old NT4 work horse was slow enough to give each document sufficient time to be printed and spooled to the printer be for printing the next document. I have played around with the advanced Tab in the properties section of the print driver where you can specify to “Start printing after last page is spooled” and so on but with no joy as each option still gives the same problem.


Now that I have explained my situation my question is: Is there away to make windows, MS Word & Excel or even Omnis Studio pause between print printing documents or even slow the process down?

Kind Regards

Ben

 

Can't blame the faster machine. What do the people over at Omnis have to say. Xerox will have the latest drivers for the XP platform. This does not come across as a spooler prob.

 

I've tried the Xerox XP driver which kept knocking the machine off line every time I printed somthing. I currently using a the MS Driver for the machine which work like a charm. The guys who designed the Omnis software package for us would look at the software but are wanting to charge some thing like £2000+ just to look at it and then any alterations or additional intervention will be charge accordingly. I'm just trying all other altnernitive routes befor calling them.

 

Call Xerox and have them install the XP drivers.. Obviously Omnis is going to blame XP rolleyes. Roll back to NT if possible ...cheapest option.

 

The drivers are not the issue here really as the MS ones work perfectly. Its the speed at which the jobs are printed. When the software is printing three single page documents a second which are sent to down to three different print queues it is then going to boil down to the document which spools first will print first. Where as before on the old system there was a short delay between the three single page documents being printed which was enough time for them to spool and print in the correct order.

 

Hey Sikvik. I'm going to try and run Windows NT 4 Server through VMWare while using a CPU throttler to wind down the CPU processing (http://mion.faireal.net/BES/) time for VMWare. If i rolled back to NT I'd need to run it on a PC which has very similar spec to the original NT Machine. Hopefully I might be able to emulate the older system with out loosing the functionality of the new PC. If anybody has any input on this type of method I would greatly appreciate it.