HP Laserjet 2550 OSX 10.5 Printing Issues (postscript-related?)

[gladapple]

I work in a student computer lab where large files, such as unflattened Photoshop and Illustrator files (Creative Suite 3), are sent to the printer fairly often. We’re having big issues with the machine hanging, spooling up for long periods of time, or even spitting out trash, especially after two or more of these jobs has been sent.

An unflattened PSD file might hang for over an hour before getting around to printing. Even a flattened or condensed file hangs longer than it should, especially if printed several times. Then normal files coming afterwards have trouble printing. We often get here an error message that says “No %%Bounding Box: comment in header!" Restarting the printer always seems to clear out the congestion and start the process over, though.

We think it might be related to the postscript file, or PPD file, that comes with the HP drivers. We’re working on OSX 10.5 (Leopard, not Snow Leopard) which may or may not be an issue, and our printer drivers are upgraded to the latest version, which is 7.8.0.761. Our PPD file is version 4.3.1.094, which seems to be the latest file version this update will install. We aren’t going to be upgrading the labs to Snow Leopard any time soon, so that’s not an option.

Any ideas on what the problem is, or how we can fix it?

[Big Al]

Probably a memory size issue. I tried to take a DIMM out of a junk printer to increase the capacity but that hung up the machine. Seems the primary DIMM has a built in RAM-DRIVE. If you want to add memory you need a DIMM with a different part number. KINGSTON.com is my favorite place to get information like this. Their memory is excellent but you can look at other sources too once you know what your options are. Of course HP will be glad to sell you more memory too.

Let us know what you find.

Al