Epson Stylus Color 440 - Printer is MUCH TOO SLOW

[M8ram]

Hi,

I have an Epson Stylus Color 440 connected to my parrallel port.

I have just printed the rpm manpage from KWord, a simple text-file in "fixed" font size 9, no special formatting or anything, just plain text. The file is 9 pages long, I would guess that the average covering of the page is about 30-40% (the amount of text). I selected greyscale from the print format tab in the properties window from the printing window. I was printing on DIN A4 paper with margins set at 9.88 mm from the right and left and 14.82 from top and bottom.

Does anybody believe that this should be a difficult printing job? I certainly don't, I would expect this to be printed in under 2 minutes!

I bought the printer august 17, 1999, so it's not that old, is it?
This print-job took OVER 11 MINUTES!

I knew from working under Windows that this printer wasn't the fastest one around, but I always assumed that the very heavy software you need to install under Windows (I run Win98SE) was to blame, because even when I set all settings to "fastest" and "lowest qualtity" it still is slow...


But 11 minutes is just riduculous, that's less than 1 ppm! If I have to print my master's thesis in may at this spead it will take over 2 hours to print the whole thing!
Can anybody tell me how I can speed this up? Does the problem lie with the printer or is it partly due to KWord? I want to write my master's thesis with OpenOffice, I am just starting to work with OpenOffice but from what I have seen (I like what I have seen so far very much btw) I can't imagine printing with OpenOffice to be any faster than this, it is a heavy piece of software...


So I am looking for tips to speed up printing.

I know printing in geryscale is faster than printing in colour, but for my Master's thesis I need colour.
I know turning off special features and special formatting speeds up printing, but I can hardly turn in an unformatted .txt file as a master's thesis, no?


Or do I have to buy a new printer if don't want to wait this long? Please tell me there is another way...

I am still studying, buying the new HP Deskjet 940C would be a serious investment for me at the moment - but at least that one should print at 12 ppm in black and 10 ppm in full-colour...


One final question - if there is no other way, if buying a new printer is all I can do, does anybody know if this new HP Deskjet 940C is already supported under Linux? (I run RH7.2 - and mostly work under KDE)
It isn't listed in the printconf-GUI yet, only the HP deskjet 930C, which will be replaced by this one...

According to http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_940C the hp deskjet 940c would be "mostly" suported...

And according to http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/distributionsupport.htm the support for this printer would have to be pre-installed with RH7.2, how come this printer doesn't show up in the printconf-GUI?


According to this article I read the Epson Stylus C40 UX and Epson Stylus C80 come with drivers for Linux... The latter should even print 20 ppm in black and 10.5 ppm in full-colour, but it's even more expensive than the HP and I never liked the quality of my Epson...


I appreciate, and anxiously await, any comment


Thanks in advance