[RESOLVED] Printer Power Save

[PaulTilley]

Hi All

I have an Oki C7350 Colour Laser printer.
It goes into power save (which I would like to keep set, as is) after x mins.

The trouble is, when I send a print job, it takes ages to come out of power save and warm up before printing.

This is used for retail receipt printing from my own VB6 system and causes a long wait for the customer before the print job is complete.

What I would like to do is send some sort of command/dummy print job to the printer at the start of the sale process, so that when the sale is complete and the receipt is ready to be printed, the printer is out of power save, warmed up and ready to jump to life immediately.

Ideally, something in VB6 would be best, but I am able to shell a DOS command if needs be.


Over to you guys now, as you are all far better than me at this sort of thing.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[westconn1]

i did that before with an oki laser, but it stopped working after some upgrade of windows or something, i have not tried since

[Magic Ink]

Its possible you may have to send it a blank page using;

Printer.Print " "
Printer.enddoc

but you may get by with just a

Printer.Print " ";

[westconn1]

Printer.Print
Printer.EndDoc

this will certainly awaken the printer, but unfortunately it also prints a blank page each time

i am sure originally i used

Printer.Print
Printer.KillDoc

but at some point this stopped working, i believe it was because of changes to the windows spooler, where the document was cancelled at the spooler, and not sent on to the printer

[PaulTilley]

Thanks for the points guys - im going to try it out now.

If it fails are there any more ideas out there?

[PaulTilley]

Update...

Whatever I seem to do results in a blank page being printed.


Any other ideas?

[PaulTilley]

As an update....

I have now decided to move the printing of the receipt a stage earlier, so that the printer has more time to complete the natural process that it does.

Thanks for the suggestions though.


Paul

[Magic Ink]

Are you sure you tried

Printer.Print " ";

[PaulTilley]

Hi

Yes I have tried that - it sucessfully puts a job into the Windows spooler, but nothing else happens.

If I then do a printer.enddoc I get a blank page printed.
But if I do a printer.killdoc it kills it from the spooler, never getting to the printer, and therefore doing nothing at all.

Ahhhh!!!

[westconn1]

i have not tried this, but if you send a document to the printer set to a manual tray, so it has to wait for user to feed paper, then cancel document from printing, there is some possibility it may work, but will require code to get into the printer queue to cancel the pending printjob

Printer.PaperBin = 258
Printer.Print
Printer.NewPage
i = Timer
Do Until Timer > i + 60  ' adjust delay to suit
    DoEvents
Loop
Printer.KillDoc

works, will require printer setting to print directly, not use spooler, which is probably fine for receipt printer

[PaulTilley]

Hmmmmm......Interesting....... I like your line of thinking.

I will need to try this out. It sounds like it **SHOULD** work in theory, providing I can kill the print job at the printer.

Not sure how I am going to achieve this yet as printing RAW will obviously not use the spooler.

I'll be back once I've tested it.

Many thanks for the pointers.