HP Designjet 600 Plotter Sloooooow

Hi, I have this 600 connected to a pentium 4 2.4 ghz with 496 mb ram on XP via parallel port. Been trying to print a single 8x11 page acrobat pdf and it takes 30 min! Then its the wrong size (I have it set to arch D size) We upgraded the plotter's ram to 20 mb, not any better. Turned off nesting too. And have it set to draft quality. Any ideas to imporve the performance of this thing? I looked in task manager and I have 39 processes running and its seems to max out the cpu when it tries to print. :confused

 

That seems to be an inherent problem trying to print pdf files. I have the same issue with my HP DJ-450, also on a parallel port. Takes forever. It seems the file size increases from say 300kb, to 25mb. This has been discussed over and over again on the Adobe forums, with no resolution. If you are trying to print 8 1/2x11, why not just use a standard printer? Seems a waste of paper on a plotter. Unless you are trying to print 24x36 (arch D). But in my office, we resolved the issue by adding a Kip 3000 to our network, it prints pretty quick.

 

Yes, I'm thinking the pdf could be causing the probs. It seems like XP expands the pdf to more than 9+ MB before sending it to the plotter. My customer wants the image enlarged, at least double the size. Should I be resizing the image before printing it, or letting the plotter resize? I wonder if printing the pdf to msft image writer then saving as a TIFF would make any difference? Aren't TIFF files smaller? He'll never be printing anything more than simple line drawings. This is a very old monochrome plotter.

 

Setup says it can connect both ways, so he only has a parallel cable. It printed a wndows test page fine, slowly, but fine. I'm going back tomorrow and maybe try printing a TIFF and a JPEG and hope for better performance! Any other advice?