Hi Daniel, That's actually not that easy to answer because it depends on the type of printing and the intelligence of the application using the printer drivers. Postscript ought to be more efficient for straight text documents with simple graphics etc but that's most often not the case. For the bulk of applications, PCL 6 is the more efficient of the protocols. However, (sorry there's always one gotcha) past history has shown that the PCL 6 drivers generally have more "features" and as a result are less stable than PCL 4/5. I agree with you that postscript, with the exception of printers using the Adobe drivers, used the Microsoft unidriver mechanism and while not necesarily terribly efficient, was simple enough to be dead stable. Flame on. Then HP lost the plot and started adding all sorts of enhancements to their postscript drivers which has made some of their postscript drivers every bit as bad as the worst PCL drivers. A good (or bad) example is the HP Color Laserjet 4650 PS which can take the spooler out in no time at all. Postscript is no longer an automatic safe choice unless you use native Microsoft drivers. I also have to state that the HP Universal Postscript driver isn't any better than th PCL driver so the size of the print job (discussed below) should be the selection criterion. Since I've gone this far I guess I may as well finish the rant and maybe add some useful information. HP obviously aren't the only player, they just have the present sorry distinction of having some of the worst corporate printer drivers for terminal services. Unfortunately, for people who have been playing with TS for a long time, that sounds almost familiar :-(. Xerox used to make the worst drivers under the sun, but now has some of the best and the Fuji-Xerox driver development team are dead serious about creating good drivers for terminal services. Konica Minolta high end printer drivers are dead stable, but they are just incredibly inefficient. As an real example, imagine printing a 5 page word document (2 MB) with embedded pictures. Pause the queue before printing and have a look at the size of the *.spl file under %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers. The stats I got were: Konica Minolta postscript - 139 MB, Konica Minolta PCL - 45 MB, native HP Color Laserjet 4500 - 8 MB. You just can't afford use Konica Minolta on a WAN without a UPD. Then there are Lexmark drivers with my pet hate, Lexdrvin.exe, that can really slow down bulk logins, but that's just a good idea gone wrong. I suppose someone thought it was a good idea to check all your printer driver files (DLLs etc) on logon. That's why I use a group policy file security setting to disable that sort of %!&^%! Flame off. If you don't have the luxury of using a real UPD (compression, no printer drivers, eg PS4, ThinPrint etc, NOT HP UPD!) and/or have a mix of UPD and network printers, there are a couple of things you should always do: The first thing is to test the driver with Citrix' Addprinters or StressPrinters utility to see if it kills anything. 80-90% of drivers will pass, although some require a huge CPU overhead in just creating a printer queue. I guess that still makes them bad in terms of logon printer creation overhead, but at least they don't crash the spooler ;-) If you want to test your existing production printer drivers, DON'T do the testing on a live production system, at the very least it may require a reboot. Either use a development server with no users on it, or backup a production server using the Microsoft Print Migrator (PrintMig) and restore on to a test machine where crashing the spooler etc won't matter. If you use StressPrinters be aware that if you select a bunch of driers, it'll kick off multiple instances of addprinters that will give you a lot more errors than you'd ever see in a production environment. Test drivers one at a time, or use a script wrapper to run AddPrinters against the drivers one at a time. There were a couple of scripts posted about 4-5 months ago, one from me that only worked on win2k3 and a more generic one by someone smarter than me that worked on win2k as well. Then try printing a standard document (one you use for all printer drivers) and have a look at the size of the spooled print job. You'll see some amazing differences in print job sizes, even among HP drivers. Go for the driver that produces the smallest print job and that'll be as good as you can get. regards, Rick -- Ulrich Mack Commander Australia On 5/25/07, Daniel Sidler <daniel.sidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rick, Thanks for the info. Trying to tap into your experience here: when you say that " HP UPDs are a big and ugly replacement for HP printer drivers that are really really ugly", do you make any difference between PCL and PS drivers? In the past there was this kind of commonplace that PS drivers were more stable than PCL, because they left out most of the fancy features the PCL drivers sported. Would you second that? Dan