Print Shop Mail & Ricoh C900

[Happyprinter]

We to run VDP thru our Fiery almost everyday to our 901. No problems at all.

[Shaja]

I work for an independent Konica Minolta dealer and we sell and support PrintShop Mail to clients in our territory. I've actively used PrintShop Mail as part of my job for 8 years. We used to be a Ricoh dealer at one time, so I've run my own PSM jobs on a good variety of machines from both manufacturers.

My go-to work-around for slow ripping was taught to me by an Atlas PrintShop Mail technician many years ago (pre Atlas/Objectif Lune merger). He told me to print the job as a pdf, then send the pdf to the printer. Granted, that defeats PSM's minimizing network traffic feature, but his tip reliably works for me.

You also may want to visit Objectif Lune's PrintShop Mail forum and post your question there. OL staff are pretty good about answering questions promptly, and they can help if you need to open a support ticket. Objectif Lune Tech Support Self Help - Forums powered by UBB.threads™

[Digital Press Guy]

Paula, I think you may be confusing RIP speed with merge speed.

Any VDP application needs to first merge all records before they can be ripped. Objectif Lune products have never been known for being overly speedy in the merge department.

Certainly you can optimize the data stream sent to the RIP to speed the RIP process. However, without a VDP job being first completely processed there is no way to insure there are no data errors.

As for running high volume of Direct Smile files, good luck with that. If you don't have a huge number of variables you might want to simply consider generating the different images, saving and calling them as variable graphics.

Good luck.

[msaeger]

Do you know if your Fiery is up to date on system software and all the patches?

[msaeger]

Here are the specs for the standard Fiery for the c900.

Fiery System Version Fiery System 8 Release 2
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz
Memory 2GB(1GBx2)
HDD 500GB (250GB x 2/ RAID 0)
CD-ROM Drive Not Supported
Operating System Windows XP

Where are you seeing how much RAM you have?

[fourpaula]

Interesting. If I look under "My Computer" on the fiery it says 2GB BUT if I look within the software (Command Workstation 5) it says 512mg. I was told that if the system had more memory it wouldn't recognize it anyway.
We went through 4 months of craziness with updates both software & hardware when we first got our C900. Last patch was done about 6 months ago.
I spoke with Print Shop Mail about the sending it to the printer issue. It was suggested that I try making the file into a PDF first & try to reduce the image size. A 2500 page PDf doesn't seem practical but I'll have to test it. I was also informed that I'll have to use good "Time Management". The most irritating part is being unable to do anything else with my computer while it is sending these jobs over to the printer. Even opening outlook while PSM is sending jobs to the printer crashes my computer.
My computer more than beat the minimum requirements for the software.
So basically we are dealing with 2 issues that may or may not be related.
#1 going from computer to printer
#2 RIP at the printer.

[msaeger]

Yeah I don't know what portion of the memory is used for what just that it comes with a total of 2 GB. I would guess adding more would screw up something.

If you print out the Fiery config page it should have 4.0 for the system software version and list a bunch of patches.

Maybe someone on the official EFI forum could help. http://fieryforums.efi.com/

[Bo3b]

from memory the fierys usually partition ram for the system and for the rip. Usually it;s the rip that gets the extra ram.
I am going back a bit so this might not apply to the newer rips, but on the C: partition (I think) there used to be a boot.ini file which had a setting in it called maxram. This was the amount of memory that the OS would use - put as much ram in the system as you want and the system would not use any more ram than the maxram setting.
What I used to do was add more ram and double the maxram setting (used to be 256, changed to 512) this would give the os more ram and the rip more ram. usually helped the performance but only up to a point. It got a point where adding more ram made no difference to the performance of the rip or os.
Faster hard drives would probably help as the fierys rip to memory - compress - save to hard disk - then read from hard disk - decompress to ram then print from ram. so the faster you can get the data to/from the hard drive and the faster you can compress/decompress (remembering that with more memory there is less compression needed) then the better the performance. Obviously a faster processor would also help.

The boot.ini tip only works for rips that are running windows - the bustled fiery rips run a form of Linux so things are obviously different.