> Geez, not to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it seems kinda crummy to solve a
> software problem with hardware.

This is only partly a software problem. The parallel port requires tight
handshake, so it will either hog your CPU or slow down transfers (or some
mixture of both).

This is a hardware design issue.

Moving the port to USB where bigger chunks of data can be transfered at
once and then be forwarded to the printer by the usb device solves this
nicely.

Having ECP (or some other advanced mode) supported on the parallelport
will, of course, at least double the data transfer rate at the same level
of CPU hogging, so it's a hack to reduce the pain ;-)


Martin