Would upgrading RAM in a HP LaserJet printer improve its performance?
Would RAM upgrade for an HP 4050N LaserJet printer matter? We have this real workhorse of a Laser Printer. It's an HP 4050N and it's been in use for many years. In the past few years, I've noticed that the processing time it takes before it starts printing can take a long time. In some cases, some print queues just process so long we end up killing them and sending it to a different printer on the network.
This HP 4050N printer has a total of 16 MB of RAM. I believe it has 8 MB built-in which I suspect is on the motherboard. There are three slots for RAM. One slot has an 8 MB stick of RAM there. I've looked in the User's Guide and apparently this model can go up to a max of 200 MB of RAM.
I've seen RAM for this printer on sale very cheap in either 64 MB or 128 MB.
My question is, would upgrading the RAM on this printer by bringing the total up to 80 MB or 144 MB have a noticeable improvement on the processing time so that when printing output that contains modern graphics be worth doing? Or is RAM even the issue and it is the processing speed of the printer's CPU that's the actual bottleneck?
Update: The RAM I ordered for $10.00 (128 MB) arrived and I installed it. So the HP4050N went from having a total of 16 MB to 144 MB of RAM. I printed the test print which previously stayed in "processing" forever and never came out, but after this upgrade it printed as normal. This suit our needs. For your situation, as they say, your mileage may vary.
On a HP4050 the First Page Out is rated at 15 second minimum. This number does not count if the printer is in sleep mode before.
Per the service manual
17 pages per minute (ppm)
100 MHz RISC microprocessor
First page out = 15 sec.
Like other told the RAM would help to buffer big document, but the actual warming up of the printer would not get speedier.
For such older printer, make sure the jetdirect support 1000 connection, as I would not be surprised to see a 10mb jetdirect card in it.
For my part I would try to upgrade it as I serviced such printer and they are easy to maintain and take care of.
I used to have a HP LaserJet 5000 (64MB) with a 10Base-T network card for printing A3 CAD drawings. It took around 2 minutes for the printer to process a single drawing.
I decided to add memory (196MB total). The effect was that the first drawing still took around 2 minutes to process, but I could send many drawings consecutively to the printer and after the first delay, they all come out in short intervals, so I think adding RAM was worth it.
RAM can help improve the ability to handle complex documents (we don't know what you're printing), but not overall processing time...
However, the 4050N was discontinued 15 years ago in 2001.
Just because you can make this printer be in service this long doesn't mean you should.
There aren't too many good reasons against moving to a more modern variant of the printer, especially with performance issues you've described over the past few years.
There may be other efficiencies in power, performance, features and consumables costs involved in doing so.
It depends, but probably not by much, most of the first page wait time is on processing the PCL or Postscript. If you see multi-page stalls then RAM would help, but not that first page raster. If the majority of the print is text, and it's Postscript, RAM won't do much at all. For that you need a faster processor.