Any tweaks for slow printing on Windows Virtual PC XPMode VM running on Windows 7 64

Discussion in 'Computer Hardware, Networking, and Connectivity' started by Jeff, Dec 24, 2010.

  1. Jeff

    Jeff Senior Member

    Joined:
    Jul 2006
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    Location:
    Michigan
    To print to some older canon fiery rips that don’t have 64-bit print drivers for windows 7, I’m using the free built-in Windows Virtual PC XPMode virtual machine where I can print to the standard 32-bit fiery xp print drivers. It works, but it seems very very slow.

    Spooling a 250 MB print file from the XP Mode VM takes minutes. The xxx of yyy MB on the virtual machine's printer dialogue roll by very slowly... minutes. The VM has 2 GB of ram allocated to it; I’ve tried increasing to 3 and it doesn’t make any difference.

    The host machine is a 3.33 Ghz W3680 6-core cpu with 24 GB of memory and a fast disk io system. I know the VM is limited to one-core but that shouldn’t be the issue in itself as one of the 3680's cores is much faster than the whole CPU of a standalone box that prints much quicker.

    On the host OS the same job prints to another fiery (a Xerox which has 64-bit print drivers available) in seconds – extremely fast.

    And on a much lower spec XP standalone computer (a xeon 3.06 that is 7 years old!) running windows XP and the exact same print driver as is installed on the XP Mode Virtual Machine, the print job completes much faster.

    So something about my Windows Virtual PC XP Mode VM is really slow when it comes to printing/print spool.

    Is this typical of the Windows Virtual PC virtual machine?

    Any tips to speed up printing from the Windows Virtual PC virtual machine?
     
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