Updating a rip on a Konica Bizhub 6500

[pspdfppdfxhd]

May be a dumb question, but anyone know if it's possible to upgrade a Creo IC-304 print controller rip driving a Konica Minolta Bizhub 6500. The rip and printer is 7 years old and kind of choking with age. (the rip I mean, not the printer).

[Made in Taiwan]

Your 6500 is 7 years old already? In that case, I would probably rather look at a completely new combination of printer and RIP - a 7 year old digital press counts as a grandpa already. I don't know how much the IC-304 could support newer machines (as far as I know, the newer models C6000/7000 already have different RIPs). So if your 6500 is going to be exchanged later, you might have to get a new RIP anyway and in that case, you might regret that you've spent money for the upgrade. For upgrading, it might be best to talk about with Konica Minolta or Creo directly, they should be to point you in the right direction.

[gig0]

The next step up from an IC-304 is an IC-307 and there is no performance improvement that we noticed when we upgraded our boxes (along with our printers). Personally, I think the 307 is a bit slower, even on newer hardware.

If performance is an issue, I would start by clearing out your accounting logs and keep that storage queue under 1500 jobs. We clear the queues down to around 600-700 (commonly run) jobs every few weeks. After that, start checking hard drive for fragmentation, errors, space, etc. I'm assuming you have a separate drive for ripped jobs. If not, pop in another HD.

Worst case scenario, you can always reformat and start fresh. I just don't think upgrading to the 307 is the solution you're looking for unless you've got money to burn.