"Rendering" on an MX4100

[hammer]

Hi Guys, I am having a weird one here and am just wondering if anyone has come across it. We have an MX4100 which, when a print job is sent to it comes up in the Job Status window as "Rendering". It blocks all jobs behind it. It isn't every job that causes it, but it is regular. The job this morning was a 25 page PowerPoint presentation, about 11MB. I sent this to print on two other MX4100's on site and it printed fine. All three MX4100's have the latest firwmare, and are all using PCL6. Any suggetsions?

[Akitu]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

Only thing I can possibly suggest would be the 512MB memory in DIMM slot 2... I've seen that one do all kinds of wacky things to print jobs.

[hammer]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

Thanks for that. Going back in tomorrow to switch around some memory DIMMS. I'll let you know how it goes.

[hammer]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

Hi Guys, we switched the DIMMs here and all seems ok. The issue was occurring quite a lot, but since putting the DIMMs in on Thursday, we have had no issue.

[KenB]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

I'm glad to hear that this is working for you.

One thing to keep in mind is that PowerPoint can make absolutely HUGE spool files when printing. That mostly happens when your slides have a background.

Each slide has to RIP separately, and that takes tons of RAM and resources. The problem is way worse when the background is a gradient fill; while it may look pretty, it doesn't print pretty.

I've already seen a 400k file become a 500 MEG spool file. (Take a problem file one day, and print it to a file. You'll see what I mean.)

It's for reasons like this that PowerPoint is not considered a basic application.

[hammer]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

Hi All, just to update you on this one. We decided to change the Hard Drive and needed to do a back-up beforehand. The client is using folders that the users print directly to. When we went to do the back up, it took an enternity to complete (23GB). It was then we discovered that one user never deleted any jobs from their folder. We have deleted these (and replaced the HDD), and the problem hasn't come back...yet


Thanks for all suggestions.

[tonerwagon]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

I have also seen something similar that the machine says rendering and the paper has begun to feed into the machine. It then seems to time out and the job status says rendering. The customer calls and says the machine is jammed due to the time out. When you try to delete the job it lets you press stop/delete. You are then usually prompted do you really want to delete this job with a yes/no option. This screen never comes up though.

[colgrimes]

Re: "Rendering" on an MX4100

Also, I just wanted to add, that Powerpoint is a presentation software not meant to print from.

If you have a customer printing from Powerpoint, there is a setting in the driver that increases printing speed SIGNIFICANTLY.

If you go to the Advanced tab, there is a bitmap compression option in the center of the page. I just change it to Medium Quality rather than High. There is no noticeable difference in quality, and the job spools probably 10 times faster.

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