At 12:01 AM 10/8/2007, Florin Iucha wrote:
>Lately, the printer slowed down drastically, the new rhythm is one
>page every 15-20 minutes!  These are PDFs, with some small graphics,
>nothing out of the ordinary.


I have worked with the HP LaserJet 5 series for years.  These 
printers choke on large graphics, exhibiting precisely the symptoms 
you report.  My hunch is that embedded in your PDFs are huge megabyte 
images, shrunk down so that they look small on the page (ie, a 24-bit 
color 2000x2000 TIFF that appears only as big as a postage stamp),  A 
LaserJet 5 will take tens of minutes to print such pages.

If my hunch is right:

** The PDF you are attempting to print is really big -- several 
megabytes per page.
** Your printer works at normal speeds on "normal" PDFs and simple 
B&W text pages.

Another explanation for big PDFs: Some applications produce PDFs in a 
fax-like process, by first rasterizing each page, then PDF-ifying the 
whole-page image to produce the PDF page.  Such PDF files can be 
immense, even if the document appears to have no graphics whatever.