Slow HP 500

I am printing a 119KB drawing with 3 xrefs at 33kb, 48kb and 13,209 kb on an
HP 500. I am using 2004 civil series on an XP P4 machine across a network.
The drawing is in color and is taking about 2 hours to plot. Is this
normal? Would additional memory in the plotter help it print faster. I
only have the standard 16Mb in the plotter. Any insight would be helpful.

Thanks

Jay

 

Hi,
the HP500 is shiped by default with a PCL3-GUI driver.
This mean that there is no "inteligence" in the plotter.
All data need to be "rasterized" by the PCL3 driver. In some cases this can
take very long, and can use a lot of memory on the PC.
(I have see cases where the PCL3 driver create 1 GB TEMP file on drive
C:.....)

You can not add memory, as there is no slot in the plotter.
The only way to speed up is to buy the HPGL2card and 128 MB of RAM.
(There is only one slot on the HPGL2 card, so the best is to add the max of
RAM)

With this you add inteligence to the plotter, and you can use the HPGL2
driver.
This mean that the rasterizazion is done in the plotter, in in most cases
much faster.


Regards
Toni