HP 1300 and printing from DOS

Archived from groups: comp.periphs.printers (More info?)

mark <mark@home.com> wrote in message news:<2004083010482475249%mark@homecom>...
> I'm leaning towards buying an HP 1300 Laserjet printer, that will be
> attached to a Windows XP computer for local printing. One package that
> I need to print from is an old DOS based accounting system, running in
> the Windowx XP DOS emulator.
>
> My understanding is that printing from DOS can be a problem.
>
> It looks like the HP 1300 has both a USB and parallel printer port, so
> I'm thinking that I will want to use the parallel port.
>
> Should I expect problems and if so are there any workarounds.

The 1300 has PCL6, PCL5, and Postscript emulations. Most DOS apps
should be able to run one of these -- if you have a choice, use
PostScript. I'm running DOS apps under Win98 and print via parallel
port without any problems. In fact, Windows spools the output, under
pure DOS I had to run a TSR spooler to get back to work in a
reasonable time. There are ways to set it up so that you can use USB
and the DOS app thinks it's using a parallel port, but it won't be
nticeably faster if at all. I think you might have the USB port
connected as well (or to another computer) at the same time, most HP
printers allow that.