If you are using a laser printer you may notice that the printer does some whirling before and after every printed document. If you are printing a single page the printer goes through a start-up cycle, prints the page, and then goes through the slow-down cycle. The additional time and turning incurred during the start-up and slow-down cycles can greatly wear out the components inside your toner cartridge causing to lighter printing and increases the likelihood of developing defects. While no printing is occurring, the components in your printer and cartridge spin just as if something was being printed. In addition, toner continues to accumulate on the drum even though there is no printing. This extra toner is swept into the waste-bin of the cartridge, reducing the supply of toner available for printing.
Of course, if you only need to print a single page, there is no way around this issue. However if you are printing a document with many pages and you notice that your printer keeps stopping and re-starting during the output of the document (meaning that your computer is not keeping up with the printer), there is an opportunity to reduce stop/start cycles. This could occur if you are printing documents from your accounting software for the year end taxes. The computer may need to crunch numbers before the page is ready for printing.
To reduce stop/start cycles use the Printer Properties | Advanced tab and tell the computer to start printing after the last page is spooled. Typically this setting is set to start printing immediately to improve user experience and reduce the perceived wait. When you change this setting, your document will start printing when the computer is done generating the entire document, so there will be an initial delay between the time you start your print job and the time the print job starts printing on the printer.
This setting will reduce the number of times your printer needs to stop and wait for the computer to generate more pages.
