At 08:40 AM 3/6/2000 , Anthony Garvey wrote:
>If you have an available slot, why not purchase a parallel port card
>(ISA or
>PCI) for about $30.  Set this card to LPT 2 and then give each printer its
>own port.  This is the most trouble free solution.


I have a color ink jet printer and a monochrome laser printer.

After using an A/B switch for a year and (as Russ Poffenberger
noted) getting garbage out each time I forgot to change the
switch to the correct printer, I bought a parallel port card.

One thing to consider is that some of these cards will allow
you to pick from more "addresses" when you install your second
parallel port. I have two SIIG parallel port cards and one
allows just two choices for the I/O address for LPT2 while the
other allows you eight choices for the I/O address for LPT2.
The first card costs about $20 whereas the second card gives
you two extra parallel ports (if you need two) and costs about
$30.) Both are ISA cards and can be used with high IRQs. I found
that neither actually uses an IRQ in Win98 or Windows 2000.

The cheaper card works fine in Win98 but for some reason, Windows
2000 chose to use both the available memory addresses for itself.
So I can't use this card with Win2000. The card with 8 choices for
LPT2's memory address allowed me to find a free address for LPT2
with Windows 2000 and is working fine.

The moral of this is that trying to save $10 may come back and
haunt you later.

By the way, if you must get an A/B switch, an "electronic"
switch (as opposed to a mechanical one) will avoid the possible
voltage spikes that can damage a Laser printer. But you must
check beforehand that the switch will work with bidirectional
printers. As people have pointer out, such a switch would likely
cost more than a parallel port card.

For reference, I have the SIIG Parallel Pro and Parallel Pro
Dual cards. See <http://www.siig.com/>.

Regards,
Bill

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html