I have Paradox running on an Acer desktop and when I print reports they come out looking all lovely, just as you would expect. But I also used to have Sony Vaio laptop and when I tried printing the same reports from an exact duplicate of the table, to the same printer, Paradox would hang (the report went blank with the Windows egg-timer appearing but staying forever). I eventually moved from the Vaio and now have an Acer laptop and the same thing happens, but not every time. Whereas on the desktop everything is fine. Am I alone in encountering this?
That is a pretty strange one. If that was happening to me, I would suspect either low disk space, corruption, or a needed update. There are known issues with ctfmon.exe so try killing that as an experiment to see if the problems go away. If so, try disabling.
So, make sure you have at least 3 times the size of the data free for each query. With large hard drives today, I'm sure this isn't the problem but would be the first thing I'd check.
Secondly, perhaps corruption is the culprit. I would start by duplicating the report with a new report to see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, I would stick with the new report and delete the old one. However, if the problem still exists I would try a table repair of ALL tables involved. I would actually rebuild each table.
Lastly, there might be a software update difference. Make sure you have applied all of the available updates for the version of Paradox you are using. Also, update Windows and your printer driver (although these are less likely to be the problem).
It could also be updated drivers. In fact this is pretty likely. Yes, alot of things changed when you went from XP to Vista but your printers in particular changed and you have new drivers under Vista. If anyone else is having this same problem under XP, I would suggest trying updated or "other" printer drivers.
I've had the same problem about twice a week in total with all my desktops and laptops on or off the network, mostly with Paradox but ocassionally with Word or WordPerfect. It usually happens within about an hour of switching on, and the work around is to do a save before printing and use task manager to close the app and restart. I assumed it was a Windows XP problem or a problem with the printer driver.
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Thanks, both. It's Paradox 11 and as no significant development is taking place I assumed there were no service packs. I see there are service packs on the Corel site mainly but not only for Vista users so will try that when I have time.
Screen reporting always seems to work OK but can be slow and, indeed there are a lot of files in the private directory. We do have NOD32 running but I don't think it checks contents of directories unless asked to.In any case I shall check if that's the case and disable it on private if needed when I have some time. Like many of these things it's not urgent but can be a pain so needs to be done.
One of my customers has developed a similar problem. When printing from Paradox 10, their printer sometimes fails to print and Paradox hangs. Following that, the printer can sulk for days on some or all programs and they have to use another one! I haven't investigated because they'd rather put up with it than pay for someone to come in! It's probably just a red herring and not related to this thread.
In addition to checking the available diskspace you may want to open up task manager and look at what the processes are doing. Is paradox pegged at a high percentage? If you have the time and just let it run will it eventually get done and print the file? How many files are in the private directory? Are there a large number of files with the .out extension?
As you may have guessed by now there are a whole lot of causes that may be involved with your issue. Data corruption and report corruption can possibly be eliminated by first running the report to screen and then printing. If the data is corrupt then it will probably take a long time to generate the report to screen. If you get the report to display to the screen and then the report still takes a long time to print you may want to look at the private directory and see if there is a very large number of files in the directory. Also, look for printers installed on the PC's that are not always available. I've seen this slow down printing, even if you are not using that particular printer. Windows takes some cpu cycles looking for printers. You may also want to check to see if you have an anti virus program running that is checking files in the private directory. You may want to try disabling checking on that directory altogether. In printing a report paradox generates a temporary file in the private directory. I'm not sure how wordperfect might play into this but it does use the BDE and it may also be hitting the same private directory.
Printers....yuck. Always so many details to gather. What kind of printer? Where is the spooling done, at the PC or the Printer? Does this affect one PC or all PC's using the printer?
Thanks - I believe the software is up to date and there is plenty of disc space so the most likely cause would appear to be corruption somewhere in the data, which I have experienced in the past. I'll try this suggestion if it occurs again.
I've had some further thoughts about that and I think the problem may be something to do with the amount of memory available. I say for these reasons: firstly, the installation of Paradox and the data it is processing is the same on both machines and both machines are using the same printer driver to write to the same printer. (The only difference here is that the desktop is writing directly while the laptop writes across the network). However, the laptop has only a quarter of the available physical memory that the desktop has (179 MB compared to 432MB on the desktop). the virtual memory is about the same. Secondly, they're both writing to the same printer.
Now, I could be barking up the wrong tree here because I know little about this and I'm just comparing numbers but it could be that having less memory and having to write across the network is causing the problem and it occurs to me that it may not actually be really hanging at all - it may just be taking so long to print that it seems to hang. When I Alt-Ctrl-Del I get the little Windows box that says the program is 'Not Responding' however I'm always suspicious of that as in the past I've notice this message when something was just taking an awfully long time to do something.
Possibly the thing to try is
1) Attaching the printer directly to the laptop instead of printing over the network
or
2) Buying a faster and more powerful laptop.
I'll post any further developments but any other opinions are always welcome.
I have some further developments on this issue.....two weeks ago I upgraded my laptop from the Acer, which was running XP, to a Lenovo which is running Vista Home Premium with 2 MB of RAM (twice as much as the Acer). I have been using this system for two weeks solidly and we've been printing reports without any problems at all. This would seem to indicate that there is no problem with Paradox itself or the data (i.e. corrupted files, that sort of thing) as the data was moved directly from the Acer and the same version of Paradox is running. That leaves two possibilities - either it is a memory issue (we've now got twice as much RAM) or else it is an issue with XP that doesn't occur with Vista. Either way, the problem seems to have gone away with this new installation and I hope this info helps anyone else who has been having the same frustrating time, having to end the program and start up again to get reports printed.
I hadn't given too much thought to it being the driver itself as the problem occurred in the past with three different printers (Epson, Canon & Samsung) however I suppose there could be some inherent problem will all printer drivers in relation to Paradox reports. The success of the last two weeks has been in printing to the Samsung, which came with a Vista driver. I haven't tried printing to the Canon, which is still attached to the network, but which still only has the XP driver. Might be worth an experiment...
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