Technical Note 10 - Printer Pooling
Important • n the P640i, many of the configuration variables are stored in the printer itself, unlike the typical printer as defined by Microsoft. All pooled P640i printers must be set up similarly.
Set up the Printers individually
For illustration, we will establish a pool of three printers. Install and setup the printers as outlined in Tech Note 9. The printers can have any names of your choosing: here we will name them Zebra P640i 1, Zebra P640i 2, Zebra P640i 3, and we will assume they are attached to ports ATLUSB001, ATLUSB002, ATLUSB003, respectively.
Before proceeding to pool the printers, test them individually, and be sure they are configured similarly. Specifically, check the following:
•Ribbon panel configuration (ribbon type, and what prints on which side of the card)
•Mag encoding configuration
•Black extraction configuration (if applicable)
Create the pool1.Go to Start > Printers and Faxes > Add a Printer
2.Click Next on the Add Printer Wizard welcome screen.
3.Select Local Printer. Make sure that Automatically Detect My Plug and Play Printer is unchecked, then click Next.
4.Select Use the following port, and choose the port that the first printer is on. In this illustration, this will be ATLUSB001.
5.In the printer list, choose Zebra Technologies as the manufacturer, then choose (for this illustration) Zebra P640i. Click Next.
6.On the next screen, choose Keep Existing Driver, then click Next.
7.Choose something meaningful for the printer name
8.Decide whether or not the pool is to be shared, then click Next. (“Shared” means that other networked computers will be able to send jobs to the pool.)
9.Choose no test page, then click Next.
10.Click Finish.
In Printers and Faxes, there should now be a printer called Pool, or whatever you named it.
11.Right click on Pool, then click Properties.
12.Click the Ports tab.
13.Check the Enable Printer Pooling box.
14.In the list of ports, select the other ports that have printers connected to them (remember that only one port was selected on the initial install). For this illustration, check the ATLUSB002 and ATLUSB003 ports, then click OK.
The setup now is three printers (Zebra P640i 1, Zebra P640i 2, and Zebra P640i 3), and one “pool”, which is all of them.
Using the printer poolSend print jobs to the pool, not to an individual printer. When the first printer has taken as many jobs as it can handle (that being two jobs - one to be printed immediately, the other waiting), the following jobs “spill over“ to the second printer, and then to the third printer.
Notice that if you are only printing two jobs, they would both go to the first printer. Pooling is a spill- over methodology. It does not balance printer usage.
Once the pool has been set up, maintenance and configuration changes should be done through the menus for each individual printer (e.g., Zebra P640i 1), not through the pool (which can produce undesirable results).
Note • The effect of any maintenance or changes can (and should) be tested by sending print jobs separately to each printer, not to the pool.
P640i Card Printer User Guide | 83 |