I am in an office and have 7 computers that are going to access a printer, we have a 48 port switch that has jacks throughout the building, would printing be any faster if I just put a switch and connected the 7 computers that need to talk to the printer? Because printing sometimes takes about 20 seconds for a page to start… so I was trying to think of a way to speed up the printing…
Thanks for any help
Not likely, the delay is likely in the way that the printer (if a network printer) handles the spooling of documents, and not actually the network itself, unless you are on a large campus WAN or over the internet.
Network printers have built-in print spooling services which typically run on pretty slow hardware. If the documents you are printing has any sort of large volume of content or graphics, it not only will take a second to send the document, but a few seconds for the printer to process it for printing.
If you post the model and current network situation of the printer, we may be able to help you further, but something you can look for right away in the printer settings is for an option such as "Start printing before spooling entire document".
Thats awesome, thanks so much for the reply... We are using Windows 10 machines with a really old HP Laserjet 4100n printer, but we are going to swap it out next week for a Brand New Brother 6180DWT, so I am hoping that having a brand new up to date printer will help with the speed, and we have the old printer connected into a print server via LPT port, and I am going to totally do away with that and go strait into a lan jack in the wall.... I just did not know if a switch would be faster or not, but it sounds like just updating the printer is going to help a ton.. :-)
Another option would be to get a print server. That handles all the spooling for you and generally has way more resources to be able to process large documents.