My printer is an HP-2025DN color laser printer with duplexing.

Yesterday it developed a problem in which graphic files (.jpg, .png, haven't tested other formats) are very slow to start printing, about 20 to 25 seconds before the printer starts up. The little LCD screen on the printer says "Printing Document", and the green ready light flashes during this time. All is normal, except for the long delay.

Non-graphic files print without delay. An Excel or MS-Word file starts printing in 3--4 seconds. A 15K PDF file starts printing in 5 seconds; saving the PDF file as a .JPG file results in a 25 second delay when I print the .JPG. Yes, the .JPG is larger (185K), but is that it?

I never had this problem until yesterday.

What has changed?

tanstaafl.

ps: I will be away from my computer indefinitely after about 11pm tonight (Thursday, US Central time), so I won't be able to test or respond after that. Could be weeks or even months.

Weeks or months? Do tell! That sounds far more ominous than a slow printer!

-jk

My wife is recuperating from extensive back surgery, I will be there to help until she is able to drive herself to physical therapy, after which I have to return to Mexico if we expect to find much of a house left. They will keep her in therapy for two months, after which she will return to Mexico for another eight to 10 months of therapy.

I told the hospital to get her back here within a week of the surgery because there were two cords of firewood she needed to split and carry up the stairs. They were not amused.

tanstaafl.

Best wishes to your wife for a quick and healthy recovery!

Good luck with the rehab!

As to the printer - does the problem persist across computers?

-jk

Only one other computer on the network. 37 seconds from telling it to print until the printer started up. Much less time than that (5 seconds?) before the printer indicated it was receiving data. File was 1.8MB.

tanstaafl.

Edit: Rebooting the printer and the computer helped somewhat, but the delays still run 15-40 seconds, seemingly related to file size.

The test photo that took 37 seconds from SWMBO's iMac took 25 seconds printed from my computer. I then inserted the picture into MS-Word and it took 15 seconds.

An MS-Word text file takes about one second.

db

Assuming that you are connected to the printer across the network as opposed to plugged in with a USB cable, then, this is a network problem of some kind rather than a problem with the printer.

See if the problem goes away after rebooting your network router(s), the printer, and the printing computer.

Also, good diagnostic trick (Assuming you are having the problem printing across the network):

Try plugging directly into the printer with a USB cable, unplugging the computer and the printer from the network, printing to the printer across the USB cable (may need to configure a new printer connection in the windows control panel for this to work), and seeing if the problem recurs on the USB cable. If it does not have a problem on the USB cable, then it's definitely a network issue and not a printer issue.

Ummm... possibly not, because the printer acknowledged that it was receiving the data (ready light flashing) from the networked computer in five seconds (possibly less) from the time I told it to print. It just spent a long time chewing on it before it started to print.

I rebooted the computer and the printer, and the problem seems greatly alleviated. At its worst it was taking several minutes to print a 2MB file. Now it starts up pretty reliably in 8--10 seconds. Maybe that is as good as it ever was, and I only noticed it now because I was frantically reprinting page after page of scanned-in data to get insurance claims filled out before I leave here in about 11 hours.

tanstaafl.

Still could have been a network problem, such as, slow to transmit the data due to packet loss, and you only noticed it being a problem on larger files with images.

Best of luck to you and your wife. Hoping for a speedy recovery.

Good luck with your wife's recovery, Doug.

It would seem either a network problem as others have suggested, or a Windows print spooler problem, if I had to give you my best guess. This is assuming the same file printed faster after reboot.

It definitely did. It went from unusable (sometimes more than a minute waiting to print) to pretty much normal. The problem was getting progressively worse until I rebooted everything, then it seemed OK. Suggestive of a memory leak, perhaps.

I thank everybody for their kind words about my wife Jean. I appreciate it. I'm signing off now, don't know for how long, it depends on whether I can make my wife's netbook computer work well enough to be useful.

tanstaafl.

That was my first thought when the reboot worked.

Good luck to you and your wife. Hurry back.