PageSense is the defacto standard in measurming printer performance from "click to clunk". PageSense system is produced by QualityLogic and has been used by PC Magazine and printer companies for many years.

Recently, David Stone from PC Magazine recently published an article about how he has upgraded to PageSense 6.1 software to do all of his printer testing.  His article highlights use of Windows Vista on his printer testing and PageSense 6.1 software.

Here are some interesting excerpts from his full article. His article can be found here at PCMag.com web site.

Although we've updated our printer test bed with faster PCs packing more memory and Windows Vista, the upgrade's effect on printer test scores is negligible.

Ever wonder how much the computer you use affects how fast your printer can go? I had a chance to answer that question when we upgraded the systems we use for testing printers. It turns out the effect is a lot less than you might think, even for printers that let the computer do most of the work. In fact, with any reasonably current computer, it doesn't seem to matter at all—in any practical sense, at least.

We upgraded to faster systems with more memory—from 2.5-GHz Pentium 4 CPUs to 3.16-GHz Core 2 Duo CPUs, from 512MB to 3GB, and from Windows XP to Vista—then looked at the effect on test results using three different printers. We saw no significant difference—an interesting result, in large part because it surprised us.

There's no significant difference (at least not in a practical sense) for any of the printers in any of the test scenarios. I didn't expect to see any difference from the upgrade to PageSense 6.1, but I was surprised to see that there also were no significant differences when upgrading to faster hardware, a new operating system, or a new version of Acrobat.

If you are using earlier versions of PageSense in your laboratories, this would be a great time to upgrade your systems to PageSense 6.1 to match what PC Magazine is using. QualityLogic is working on a new version called PageSense 6.2 which will add support for Adobe Acrobat 9, Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications, QuarkXPress 8 and ISO 24734 performance monitoring metrics.

For more information about PageSense, please contact QualityLogic at tools@qualitylogic.com or call (805)531-9030.