I can't quite see why it needs to go to the printer, why not just from camera to computer using the USB cable provided with the camera. Can't help with best import/sort software for PC as I use mac. Once in a folder, DPP picks up the folder as thumbnails and you can then either toggle between 1 image in the main window and the thumbnails or open N pics to edit each in their own edit window. The latter if you have several needing the same basic 'recipe', tho no 2 of mine ever seem to.

Although you appear to be working on fine tuning the pic 'real time' you are actually working on a high quality preview and it is only when you 'convert and save' that it takes a bit longer. But you can stack them up and do a batch convert while you have supper & until you do convert, any number of images in the 'thumbnail' folder stay exactly as you left them.

DPP is very memory efficient as it leaves the .CR2 files on the hard-drive and only caches the 'recipe' or changes, ie 200-300k per image as far as I can see. (As opposed to PSE4 which grabs the entire RAM, cache and anything else it can get hold of, which apart from making it slower for other progs to get moving, probably also accounts for why it flattens a battery faster than all the others put together).

The next piece of cunning is to see what tweaks you do regularly (eg sharp or saturation + 1 or 2 points) and re-set them in a camera 'parameter' set. So sometimes you do nothing other convert and save or maybe crop.

Can't see much call for NeatImage if exposure was correct(ish) and you leave off the RGB edit panel or use it very sparingly.