HOWTO: Speed Up Printing in Windows

ID: Q118743

The information in this article applies to:

SUMMARY

There are several ways to speed up printing in Windows. You can apply these tips separately or simultaneously, depending on the desired behavior:

In the Printer Setup dialog box, choose Setup and reduce the dots-per- inch (dpi) printer resolution.

In the Control Panel, run the Printers application, and clear the Use Print Manager check box. This will speed up printing, but will slow down overall system performance while the print job is printing.

On some printers, you may want to use built-in printer (device) fonts instead of TrueType fonts. Printer fonts have a printer icon next to the font name. Note that printer fonts are generally less flexible than TrueType fonts, and if you use printer fonts, your output may differ from what is shown on your screen.

If your PostScript printer supports downloadable fonts, you might want to use printer fonts in place of TrueType fonts to speed up printing and to use less printer memory. To do this, in the Advanced Options dialog box of the Printer Setup command, select the Use Printer Fonts For All TrueType Fonts check box.

On dot-matrix printers, TrueType fonts print only in the graphics mode of the printer. Because most dot-matrix printers can only print graphics in near letter quality (NLQ) or letter quality (LQ) mode, draft (text) mode is not available when printing a document with TrueType fonts; therefore, using TrueType fonts may slow down printing significantly. Using a built-in printer font in generally faster in this case.

Make sure the TEMP directory setting (SET TEMP=) in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file is valid. In addition, make sure that the TEMP directory is not cluttered with old unused temporary files. For better performance, the TEMP directory should be located on an uncompressed drive.

For more information about temporary files, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q92635 Windows Temporary Files

Additional query words:


Keywords          : kbFont kbPrinting kbVFp300 kbVFP260 
Version           : 
Platform          : 
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: August 2, 1999