What affects printer speed?

After purchasing a new laptop I tried out my printer. It's a HP C4280 all-in-one printer. On my old laptop the printer took about 10-15 seconds to print out each page full of text. Printed in black colour only. On my new laptop I used the same printer, printed the same couple of pages and each page took less than 5 seconds to print out. I used my USB 2.0 ports to connect my printer's USB cable.

What exactly is increasing my printing speed so much? I have a 3.0 USB port so if I used that I'd probably increase the printing speed even more.

 

Depends on how fast the information is transfered to the printer. ie if your old laptop had say usb 1.0 then 2.0 will transfer faster and the document can be printed faster. If the printer only has usb 2.0, then the laptop using 3.0 shouldnt have any further effects on printing speed. Another reason might be that, when you got your new laptop, you installed a newer and better driver for the printer which increased the speed.

Also if you can tell us how fast it "printed" and how fast it "started to print" that would allow better answers to be given.

 

plus the amount of memory on the printer

 

Your new laptop might be rendering and spooling the print job faster, or your old laptop might have been particularly slow.

Re: gerryf19, it's the same printer, so that's not a factor.

 

also the type of printer affects the speed. Laser printers will print more ppm then a inkjet

 

For me it's weird that sometimes it takes a few seconds for my cannon mp8300 to start printing, sometimes it takes a whole minute of waiting before it starts(the printer would make weird sounds like it's trying to do something). And the actual printing process varies in time also(shipping lables), sometimes in one fluent moment and sometimes would stuck for a while.

I think it should depend on the printer more, since any modern computers should be more than capable of handling printing.

 

Most modern cheap/basic printers use your computer's CPU to process the page. That's why you see the difference between new and old computer.

 

The phrasing is a bit misleading since printing speed is a constant. For example, if a pump can move 5 gpm, you can use that to calculate how long it will take to move 50 gallons. However, if there is a hole in the pipe and 1 gallon per minute is leaking out, that does not mean the pump can now only move 4 gpm. It's still a 5 gpm pump! I'm pretty sure your printer dynamics isn't the dependent variable, rather, cache and data transfer.



NOTE: I had an instructor once take off 5 points because a student giving a presentation called a device a odometer, when in fact, it was a fuel gauge. We all knew what he meant, but he still paid a 5 point penalty nevertheless. I never forgot that.

Am I being anal retentive here? Perhaps. But I can't tell you how many times I've been held back because of inaccurate or incomplete phrasing. Sometimes getting the details straight can make all the difference in the world.