[willed]

How come printing on my iBook with an hp Deskjet is comparable to that with my Macintosh Classic and Stylewriter? It's such an effort for it to print a Word document with a few other things running. At the moment I've got my usual iTunes, Word, Safari, MSNMsgr, Mail combo open, plus Backup running, but even so I thought they'd figured out background printing a while back? The inkjet does a couple of passes, then the printer stops to think for a while. Then does a few more. I mean surely all the computer has to do is send a tiny file to the printer. Why so slow?? It's a two page text document!

And yes, I have the latest drivers.

[pat++]

Which "lastest" drivers do you use ? did you try Gimp-Print drivers?

[moss514]

Gimp-print has fixed all of my printing problems. Both Epson and HP..

[Thinine]

It's slow for a couple of reasons. First, MS Word is a slow, bloated piece of crap and that makes it slow in all reagards. Second, HP's drivers probably aren't real efficient, which contributes to the slow down. Third, OS X's preemptive multitasking means that processes have to share CPU time, no matter the cost.

[tooki]

Word's slowness has nothing to do with it. Once Word has passed the print job on to Print Manager, it's out of Word's hands.

tooki