Digi MIL-3000FTX manual Spooling Versus Non-Spooling Printing Introduction, DOS and OS/2

Note: During configuration, a dialog box may appear saying: “The printer that you’ve connected to doesn’t have a driver for that printer.” This is normal. FastPort does not know how to format the data for the printer. Formatting is done on the workstation “before” being sent to FastPort.

3.1.6 Spooling Versus Non-Spooling Printing

3.1.6.1 Introduction

NetBIOS machines normally support either spooling or non-spooling printing to network printers. Spooling is when a print job is sent to the hard drive as a printable file and is printed in the background, while the application returns to a normal state. Non-spooling is when a print job starts and finishes before the application returns to a normal state.

The Windows methods described previously are generally non-spooling methods. One way to tell if a workstation is spooling or not, is to print to the same printer twice in a row. Open the print manager, if both jobs are in the list, the system is spooling the print job. But, if the first print command does not return until the job is printed (not printing two jobs in a row) the system is non-spooling print jobs.

3.1.6.2Configuring Windows 95/NT to “Mimic” Spooling

1.From “Start,” select Settings and then Printers to create a printer.

2.Click once on the specific printer.

3.From the “File” pull-down menu, select Properties.

4.From the “Properties” menu, select Details

5a. Windows 95: From “Details,” select Spool Settings...

5b. Windows NT: From “Scheduling,” click once on Spool Settings...

6.Click on Spool print jobs so program finishes faster to make the printer “spooling”. Click on the Print directly to the printer to make the printer “non-spooling.”

3.1.7DOS and OS/2

To force a printer to spool for DOS or OS/2 (LAN Manager - LAN Server):

1.Open a command prompt box.

2.Use the NET USE LPT1 \\<FASTPORT>\<PORT> command to redirect an LPT port.

Print jobs are now spooled. When configuring a printer, choose the LPT1 port as the printer destination.

MIL-3000FTX Series of FastPort Print Servers 3-5