Slow printing

Today I tried to print some of the slides and papers that I need to read for the courses at the ETH. Compared to the printing at DAIMI I find printing here at the ETH very slow.

The rule seems to be that you submit your print job to the printer via the VPP system (a nifty abbriviation standing for both “Versatile Printers and Plotters” and “Verteilte Printer und Plotter”) and then you wait… and wait… and then perhaps half an hour later you will be able to pickup the result of your waiting: your document printed on slightly gray recycled paper.

I don’t really mind the paper that much — we don’t pay for it, so it’s okay that it’s not pure white — but the amount of time one has to wait is a bit too much. Maybe it’s just because of bad memory, but when I think back to how it was at DAIMI, then I believe things went faster there.

Another slightly annoying thing about this VPP system is, that I haven’t yet figured out how to print from the Linux and Solaris systems they have installed here at the ETH. At DAIMI it was as easy as lpr -P stibitz-115 file.ps but as far as I’ve understood the VPP system then it isn’t that easy. But at least I can print from Windows in the mean time…

Oh! — my two print jobs have finished: 22 minutes for the first and 27 minuttes for the second job.

Leave a comment