This is quite an arcane problem, just so you're warned... I have a Canon LBP660 laser printer, which uses the Microsoft Windows Printing System. (If I'd known that the printer used a proprietary Microsoft system before I got it, I probably would have bought a different printer, but anyway... I recently upgraded to Windows 98, and the printer worked fine. I even had it plugged into my PC via a CD-Writer, using an EPP Parallel port setting, and it was fine. I use it to do high-quality grayscale graphics printing, using Photshop 4 and later Photoshop 5. It worked fine, even printing out 50MB files with no complaints. I got Quark Express 4, and did some high-quility graphics printing. 12cmx12 cm 300 dpi bitmaps, about 2 or 3 megs in size. Quark didn't like this, and when printing I got errors telling me that the transmission rate to the printer was too slow, and so it only printed out about a third of the file. I played around with this for a while, tinkering with _all_ the settings for Quark, my printer, and the Windows Printing System. No help. Photoshop 5 still worked fine. I decided to try and old DTP package, Adoge PageMaker 5.0. To my surprise, PageMaker 5 was able to deal with the large grapical images without any difficulty. So that worked for about a week, until suddenly, between print jobs (two very similar versions of the same file, in fact) it began giving the same error as Quark Express did - it printed outa third or so of the file and then insisted that the transmission rate was too slow. I went back and checked over older files which had printed fine before and which I hadn't changed - and these wouldn't print either. Getting a little panicky, I tried it with Photoshop 5, again using files that had printed with no problems before. Photoshop 5 gave the same error. I don't understand why or how this happened. I made absolitely no changes to the system, to PageMaker, to the printer settings, or to Photoshop, and some of these files I had printed from Photoshop just an hour or so before, with no difficulty. PageMaker had crashed at one stage, necessitating a restart, but how this could affect other packages I had no idea (and still don't). I tried everything I could think of, going through every combination of printer and application settings I could find. To no avail. I then disconnected the CD-Writer, changed the BIOS Parallel Port setting to ECP (wihch is the preferred setting for the LBP660), connected the printer directly to the paralell port, and tried again. I also reinstalled PageMaker. At this stage, Photoshop 5 printed the files correctly again, which was something, at least. But both Quark and PageMaker now started giving me entirely different problems. I tried the same files again in both packages. Now they printed, but insisted on downgrading the image quality to a considerably lower resolution than I had specified, and lower than the resolution they used to print at. They completed printing the images, but at much lower quality. Again, I went through all the settings I could find, to no avail. I altered the grey patterning, the Automatic Image Refinement, the transmission retry rates - everything I could find. I did the same with all the printer settings in PageMaker and Quark. It makes no difference. Files that printed out with no difficulty just hours before now came out at a much lower resolution. As I said, this problem does not affect Photoshop. (Although it did before I changed the connection to the printer). I have a workaround for this, but it is extremely unwieldy and involves mnipulation of EPS files, which is slow and which does not produce quite as high a quality of text rendering in the printouts. I'm totally at a loss. I can only think that there is some file which controls how Windows prints from vector-based packages like Quark and PageMaker that has been altered somehow. I have no idea what this might be; also I don't understand how Photoshop 5 was at first affected by this problem. Incidentally, I also reinstalled the Windows Printing System. And I have the most recent version of it currently available. I haven't yet tried running under a different OS; I'm going to try it under NT and '95 at some stage, but that will take a while to set up. If anybody has any clues to a solution (or even an explanation!) I'd love to hear them. CS

Dear C.S., I too have been having problems with the Canon LBP660 which was purchased by my client 4 months ago. The printer is attached to the parallel port (ECP) using the latest driver downloaded from Canon's web site. However my problems are different. The problem is an out-of-memory error. This usually occurs after the printer is used for a while throughout the day and sometimes necessitates a restart. Twice the computer crashed with a bad sector result, and is making me wonder whether the fault is with the printer, driver, WPS or Windows 98 virtual memory management. I have tried everything from adding more RAM (now 64 MB) to reinstalling everything anew (OS, apps, driver) but the problem still recurs. The online help advises to reduce the resolution, to quit application during the error or to add more RAM but that did not work. I read in another forum that the problem could be due to a memory leak (God knows what that means) under Windows 98 and downgrading to Windows 95 seems to cure the problem. I haven't tried it yet though but will write again if that works. Cheers. Nik

We have the LBP-660 on three sites, all running Win98 SE all getting out of memory errors. One site was running fine on Win 95b then we installed a full install of Win 98, then SE to solve the problem (it didn't). I rang Canon Sydney Australia and the help desk were aware of the problem and advised me to try to install the latest WPS version 1.06, this has not corrected the problem. In the Canon Win 98 driver area there is no mention of Win 98 drivers for the LBP=660, they are only located in the WIn 95 area (just an observation), if anyone has any ideas to fix the problem it would be appreciated.

can I use the printer to printed on another paper ? (custom paper)

I am using a Canon LBP660 on my system with W98 first edition and have had no problems so far. I am using the drivers supplied when I purchased the printer. I have noticed though when installing different printers on systems with W98 SE or first release that printer problems occur when using the printer drivers supplied on the W98 CD. In particular the HP and Canon inkjet drivers do not work properly and it is only when the drivers have been replaced with the drivers that were supplied with the printer that the problems appear to disappear. It seems to me that the drivers on the W98 CD seem to be at fault.

I have just reinstalled the LBP-660 printer on my 533 pentium FS133 with Win98. It works Ok. Only I had to reinstall it several times and now the ECP with DMA seems supported, which I copuld not do before.

I have just installed LBP-660 under Windows 2000 Professional using the latest NT/2000 driver WPSC3NT (R1.12.) That works fine, but when I go to share this printer so it can be accessed by Windows 98 computers there is a button "Click to add additional printer drivers to your system so that users running other versions of Windows can connect to your printer without being prompted to install drivers missing from their systems." The prompt for additional drivers allows me to check the box Win95/98 but then asks for Windows 2000 Server CD ROM (Printers folder)As I have only Professional (workstation)this folder does not exist on my CD. I have downloaded the Win98 drivers (3 disks) from Canon, but clicking on the ini file causes the message "Please use the setup program" to appear. What is a way around this? Is there a single Win98 windows printing system driver I could use instead? (as with the NT/2000 file).