You are the desktop administrator for your company. You connect a print device to a Windows XP Professional computer for the users in the help desk department. You share the printer on the network as HDPrint. You grant the HDUsers and HDManagers groups Allow – Print permission on HDPrint. Several users in the HDUsers group report that it often takes several minutes for their print jobs to print after they are submitted. You investigate and discover that under normal use, the print queue length often exceeds 50 print jobs. You want to improve printing performance for the users in the HDUsers group. What should you do?
A.
Install a second printer that uses the same print device. Share the second printer as HDPrint2. Configure a priority setting of 99 on HDPrint2.
B.
Increase the print job priority settings to 99 for all print jobs that are submitted by the users in the HDUsers group.
C.
Connect a second, identical print device to the Windows XP Professional computer. In the properties for HDPrint, select the Enable printer pooling check box.
D.
In the printer properties for HDPrint, select the Print directly to the printer option and clear the Enable advanced printing features check box.
Explanation:
The single print device is struggling to keep up with the number of print jobs. Therefore, we need to create a printer pool. The printers in a printer pool must be identical (at least they need to be able to use the same printer driver). By connecting one logical printer to multiple print devices through multiple ports on the print server, the printing pool appears to users as a single printer. When a user prints a document to the printing pool, the document is printed on the first available printer in the pool. Users are not required to know which printer is available. The logical printer checks for an available port and then sends documents to ports in the order in which they were added.
Incorrect Answers:
A: With this solution, print jobs sent to HDPrint2 will print before print jobs sent to HDPrint. However, this will not improve the overall printing performance. The problem is the number of print jobs being sent to the single print device. We can alleviate the problem by adding another print device.
B: This will have no effect on the print jobs. The print jobs will still have the same priority as every other print job and so will not print any quicker.
D: This option will not make the print jobs print any faster. It just means that the print jobs will join the print queue slightly quicker.
Press, Redmond, 2002, Chapter 6, Lesson 2