[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] The score, Susan 1, HP CP2025X defeated - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Fri, Mar 20 2009 21:13 bradley

The score, Susan 1, HP CP2025X defeated

I was setting up a HP CP2025X yesterday and loaded up the HP PCL 6 driver.  Test page printed fine.  Anything else came out with a cryptic PCL XL error on a clean white page.  In googling you could tell that this was an often hit issue with certain HP printer drivers.  Nice.

So in this corner is me, Geek.  Stubborn female.  Never said "Uncle" yet to a piece of technology and not going to start today.

In this corner one HP printer who put up a fight.

Ultimately it lost, I won, and here's what I had to hack up inside the printer driver to work as it should.  (Mind you I couldn't use the HP universal PCL 5 driver because it only supported black printing and when this is a color printer you kinda want that to work.)

In the printing preferences I had to adjust the "print data optimization" to "Optimize for Text and Vector"

I then had to adjust the Print processor to not use the HPZPP5k4 engine but instead to use hpcpp083

Why did I choose that? The very scientific process of it was the first on the list that sorta looked like it was an HP processor.  If it had not worked I would have tried the hpzpplhn next.

But as you can see by the google hits, these HP drivers are starting to get a bit troublesome.  It's not like the good ole' HP 4L printer I have at home that has connected to everything from probably a Win95 to a Win98 to a ME to an NT to a 2000 to a XP, to a Vista, to a Win7 and never ever sucked CPU cycles, threw off errors or anything.  Probably the reason why HP stopped building them like that.

There's even a patch upcoming in Vista sp2 taming down the CPU suckage of some of the HP printers drivers that install extra 'stuff' in the drivers.

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# re: The score, Susan 1, HP CP2025X defeated

Saturday, March 21, 2009 7:44 AM by Susan

Susan,

I had issues a couple weeks ago with drivers as well. How do you determine what print processor to use? Still have one lingering issue when printing pdf docs. On one HP color printer the file size at print time remains about 4kb, when printed to a B&W HP printer the pdf file size balloons to 10MB. Using the winprint processor. Have yet to google a answer on what processor 'should' be used.

Best,

Bill V

# re: The score, Susan 1, HP CP2025X defeated

Sunday, March 22, 2009 12:02 AM by Evan

I've been less and less thrilled with HP printer drivers over the last few years, to the point that I've tried to steer Customers clear of them (in favor of Dell, for the most part).

HP's driver people don't seem to understand that I want them to install the smallest amount of code on my computer as possible. I don't want "innovation" in drivers-- I want a reliable, predictable, working print device.

# re: The score, Susan 1, HP CP2025X defeated

Monday, March 23, 2009 10:23 AM by Dean

I think the problem is more with PCL 6. I have never had any luck with PCL 6 drivers. But it looks like they are getting rid of PCL 5. Great.