Hello JPBoudreau,

As this is only occurring on your Win98 PC's, and only on the "print cheques" function, have you considered swapping the machine the print checks with an XP box (since you know that works)? Since you wouldn't need a monitor, even the cost of buying one new PC for the person printing cheques should be less than $600. Of course, if you have 10-15 people printing cheques on Win98 machines, the economics might change a little.

Hello JPBoudreau,

I talked to the client and understand the hesitation about replacing the Win98 PCs. The problem is that this is as likely to be a printer driver/Win98 issue as an Adagio/Win98 issue, and no-one will be very keen spending R&D time trying to track down a problem in a 6 year old platform that is not re-creatable on Win XP.

I'll see if a general discussion here can suggest some alternatives.

Hello JPBoudreau,

We've had some issues with PCL6. Try running in PCL 5 mode. You might also try a driver from a printer closer to Windows98 vintage to see if that solves the problem. Also, the site mentioned that the issue that prompted the purchase of a new printer was the bank requesting magnetic toner for the MICR encoding. If the old printer was working properly, perhaps you might try a web search looking for magnetic toner cartridges for it.

Hello JPBoudreau,

If you delete the MICR number from the specification, does the problem "go away"?

If you used the old printer driver with the new printer, does that work?

Oh yes - the MICR Toner cartidges are just normal cartridges filled with magnetic ink. These are often available from third party providers for older printer models.

Hello JPBoudreau,

From Adagio Payables, select Maintain | Maintain specifications. In the specification designer, select File | Open to open he check specification that is causing the problem. Move to the cheque body and find the two fields at the bottom of the section labelled "MICR". Delete them.

Use File | Specification Options to change the specification name.

Use File | Save as... to save the specification without the MICR field under a new name.

Try printing with this spec and see if the poblem is related to the MICR font.

Also, there are several printers of this model on HP's web site. Could you point me at the specific URL from which I could download the driver you are using? I will try and re-create the behaviour at our office.

PS. What was the printer that was replaced? Have you tried using its driver with the new printer (if it was an HP Printer)?

Hi JPBoudreau,

Thanks for the link to the HP printer driver. I'll have someone download it sometime next week and see if we can re-create what you are experiencing in our Windows 98 environment.

Just an aside that the failure is occurring in the printer driver (see the name of the file). It may well not be an Adagio problem, but an issue with the 16bit version of the driver that would be running under Windows 98.

Hello JPBoudreau,

Well - we managed to download the driver you pointed to an get it loaded on a Windows 98 mahcine... Unfortunately, here's the report on the results:

We was unable to get the PCL6 driver for the HP2300 to work at all from AP. It hangs AP. It won?t print a test page properly. When printing from Word 97, I get a ?PCL XL error?. We gave up on that driver.

With PCL5e driver:

• Won?t print a test page properly on the 8000 or other 2 HP machines on our network. Prints black bars for text.
• Prints a totally black page when print a check from AP.
• Prints a test doc from Word okay (but we're not sure what that proves)
• Previews a check (with MICR) to screen without an error
• Prints a check to file (via the driver) without an error
  

So, we can?t get the 2300 driver to work properly on any printer we have here. But, printing to a file should have caused any error that would have happened if printing to the printer. The PCL5 driver for Softrak's HP 8000 does work okay.

I'm not sure what else we can do. We can?t duplicate the problem you are experiencing. I think you will have to keep trying different drivers.

If you send us your specification, we can try and duplicate your problem here. You can e-mail it to me and we can see if it is related to the specification file.

As a test, can you print from the sample data using a sample spec? Using the spec that's causing the problem?

We had the same problem running with Windows 98SE and using an HP1200 printer. I understand it is a memory problem, and the print job, for running cheques in particular,is too big. I changed the printer driver to HP Laserjet III, it works. (To accomplish this I set up another printer in Windows, called cheque printer, and designate that as a specific printer to use for cheques in the Adagio setup). We occasionally get this error still, but if we minimize the number of other background programs/processes running at the same time it helps too.

We don't have MICR fields in our specification.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the response, BD. Definitely a good thing to know about the printers and drivers.

Because you can insert bitmaps into checks and other specifications, the file size of the pages can be significantly larger than typical printed reports. If you insert a larger bitmap and shrink it down within the spec, it still keeps the original file size.

If you are using bitmaps on your check specs, perhaps you can resize it in a graphic application (even MS Paint) and re-insert it into the spec. If the issue has to do with memory, then perhaps this can help save some.