Jim,

> We took advantage of the free color printer and purchased a JetDirect box to
>  connect the Xerox/Techtronix printer to the HP3000.  This printer replaced
>  an HP LJ 4500 printer that worked real nice with the HP3000.  The new
>  printer doesn't work so nice.  We use it as a dumb printer a lot of the
time
>  (printing price lists and other fixed-font reports), so I have it defined
in
>  NPCONFIG like this:

[snip]

>  The problem is that this new printer takes 4-5 times as long to print a
file
>  as the HP LJ 4500 did.  At first it wasn't too bad, but it has rapidly
>  become unbearable as we are now printing our monthly price lists (long and
>  several copies each).  What used to take an hour or so is now taking five
>  hours (so far).
>
>  Any ideas?

The problem probably doesn't lie in your network settings. Rather, because
the print engine mechanisms that the HP4500 and the Tektronix/Xerox 850
printers use are considerably different (xeroxgraphy vs. melted crayon), the
printers have intrinsically different print times.

The HP4500 prints at about 4 pages per minute in color, with only one
resolution setting. The 850, in contrast, prints at significantly different
speeds based on the printer resolution that you choose.

Because your HP3000 printer settings know nothing about printer resolution,
whatever resolution you're currently printing at was defined on the front
panel. The lower the resolution you choose, the faster it prints. For simple
text and block colors, you won't notice much difference in the various
resolutions. But you will notice a great deal of difference in speeds.

Lower the resolution of your printer and see if things don't considerably
speed up. Indeed, at the lowest resolution setting, the 850 should be several
times faster than the HP4500 (perhaps 3 times faster).

Because you're a QueryCalc customer, call sometime and let me show you how to
control all of this through QueryCalc's printer setup files. But there we're
using PostScript. If there are equivalent command sequences for the 850 in
PCL, I don't know what they might be.

Wirt Atmar