I need help with a printing problem. I am running proprietary software for a Mass Spec. It doesn't matter really if you know what the mass spec is. The engineers who wrote the software disabled print spooling b/c it conflicts with the program. I would like to print to file. However, that seems impossible without the spooling feature. Is there a way to hook another computer up through the parallel port and print to that computer? I would like my OS2 machine to think that it was printing to a printer. However, instead of a printer, I would like another computer to be able to interpret the print codes and allow me to save the file to disk. Can anyone offer a suggestion? Thanks.

I don't know WHAT your mass-spectroscopy program might be doing to interfere with the OS/2 spooler. It sounds more like a conflict in the hardware. Maybe your computer communicates with the mass spectroscope via the parallel port (not surprising since you need to move a LOT of data), or maybe there is a conflict with the interrupts. The fact that you are not able to print--with or without the spooler--is the clue. In a normal OS/2 system, you can still print with the spooler off. What you need to do is print using something other than LPT1. There are two solutions; I know that both of them work because I use them both! The first, and cheaper, is a second parallel port. Configure this as LPT2 and let it use IRQ 5. (Your LPT1 port uses IRQ 7. The idea is to avoid a conflict.) The second solution is to print over a LAN. It takes some time to figure out how to set it up, but it works very well once you get it going. Once you have things set up, your application programs will be completely unconcerned with the fact that they are talking to a printer not connected to LPT1. Also, you'll be able to use the spooler again.