The “Break it Down” Blog

Every since I got my Infrant (now NETGEAR) ReadyNAS NV+, I’ve been using the Print Server feature of it to hook my HP LaserJet 1200 series printer to it. Unfortunately, it’s always exhibited strange printing behavior, more specifically:

• From most applications, the first time I try and print, the Print job/command is completely ignored. So if I want to print a webpage, email, image, document, etc. I have to basically “Print” twice, and then it will print the second time.
• From all applications, opening the Print dialog can take 3-4 seconds and actually printing some types of docs, like PDFs, can take about 15-25 seconds per page — taking such a long delay that the printer actually spools down and goes back to sleep before another page is printed.
  • Having done my taxes recently, this last point, it actually took me close to 15mins to print my 33 page filing.

Getting to the point of just not being able to take it anymore, I went on the hunt on Google and found this thread which recommended the poster read this thread, which was a solution formulated from this Samba mailing list thread.

The gist of the problems seems to be that the network printer hosted up by the ReadyNAS gets added in Windows under the DevModPerUser or DevModes2 registry nodes which are responsible for severly slowing down the printer job processing. The solution is to find, and remove, your printer references from either of those nodes:

The full path to the key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\ – and under there you want to scan the DevModePerUser, DevModes2 and Settings groups to make sure no references to your printer are made.

Once they are removed I think there is a small refresh cycle (you can reboot to make sure) and then your printing experience should be much faster.

Still no idea why the printer gets added this way on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and why it’s not in the ReadyNAS help docs for the Print Server… but I’m just happy to have a solution. I saw a roughly 50-80% increase in printing speed after making the change.