Lamont Level B PCs very slow in printing PDFs

Hello all,

The PCs in the reference area seem to be taking a long time to send PDFs to the printer. Sometimes they don't show up on the printer queue for 10 minutes. I have been advising patrons to try a Mac or to try the cafe printer. Is there anything else I should be doing? I know that this has been a problem for a while, but usually there is a dialogue box on the screen that shows the computer's progress in transmitting something to a printer. Now it appears to send immediately, but when you swipe your card nothing shows up.

Word documents, however, seem to show up in the queue right away.


Update:  Here's a meessage from Julia Starkey.

"Without more detailed information it’s hard to know.   The most likely reason is that PDFs had a lot of images, a large file size, or both.  When people print out PDFs of readings it can often be slow because their teacher hasn’t done anything to compress the file size.  Typically the delay is more like a few minutes, not ten minutes.  The large printer (B-Q3) does take a while to warm up if it’s been off, so that could explain it.

In order to investigate this I would need the following information several incidents.

What time it happened (i.e. Thursday at 9:30pm)

What computer the patron used and what printer they sent it to.  (Lam9 sent to printer #2 OR own laptop to printer #3)

What type of document (word or PDF)

Any error messages that were displayed

In order to investigate what has happening at the printer, the IT department needs that information. It allows them to pinpoint the problem and figure out exactly what happened."

 If people want to keep recording the problem here, maybe we can get enough information.