Mary Wolden helped me greatly with my printer problem - many thanks, Mary
for your well-informed and clear advice - and this is how she did it, for
the sake of those on the list who may have similar problems:
I was having a series of problems with my Epson Stylus Color 600. The first
was that I couldn't find any drivers for it, and so had set it up as an
Epson Stylus Color 800. It was printing, but only in black-and-white.
Mary wrote:
You can find the appropriate driver for your Epson 600 here:
http://support.epson.com/hardware/printer/inkjet/sc600_/filelibrary.html
The white lines through the black or color printing are an indication that
you have clogged nozzles on your print head. Once you install the proper
driver for your printer ( there are drivers for Win3.x, Win 9x. Win NT, and
Macs) you can print a test page and use the cleaning utility to clean the
print heads. The cleaning utility can be found by going to "Start,
Settings, Printers". Right click on your printer and select "Properties",
then select "Utility", then select "Head Cleaning". After cleaning the heads
you should get an option to print a "Nozzle Check" which will show you if
any print nozzles are still clogged. If Epson printers aren't used for a
time the print heads tend to become clogged. I have had to clean the print
heads up to 6 times in a row to get them totally cleaned when the printer
has not been used for some time. Replacing a cartridge does not fix clogged
print heads on Epson printers because the heads are not in the cartridges
like HPs. Before you throw the printer away try installing the correct
drivers and then cleaning the print heads, you may still have a working
printer.
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I downloaded this installer and set it up, and ran the cleaning utility over
and over again, until the pattern on the page showed all four colours:
black, cyan, yellow and magenta.
Mary warned me to uninstall the Color 800 properly:
To uninstall the 800 printer driver go to "Start" then "Settings" and click
on "Control Panel" to open it. Double click on "Add/Remove Programs", Then
scroll through the list to find the Epson printer driver. I do not know if
each ( the 600 and the 800)driver will be separately listed or not. Mine
are. Anyway highlight the 800 or the Epson driver then click the button to
Add\Remove. Windows will walk you through the uninstall process. If you
only had one driver then it will probably remove both drivers and you may
need to reinstall the 600 driver. The reason for doing this is that
installing the 600 drivers over the 800 drivers may not write all of the
correct settings to the registry, leaving some of the 800 drivers files
still there. You may get a message that you are removing the printer and
windows will select a default printer if you have one or say that there is
no printer on this computer, just continue with the uninstall.
--------------------------------
Mary had explained:
First have you printed the nozzle check to see if any of the color nozzles
are unclogged. This is found where the head cleaning utility is and should
be printed after each cleaning. By using the utility after each head
cleaning it helps the printer to clean to a higher intensity cleaning cycle
and lets you know how you are progressing. I may not have made this clear
before. If your printer has not been printing color for awhile and has not
been shut down you may need a new cartridge ( note: Epson printers should
only be turned off at the printer not through a power station, because the
heads do not park in the right spot to keep the heads clean if turned off
through a power station.). The ink loses its viscosity as it gets old and
dries out. Also Epson cartridges can look like they have color in them but
it tends to stick to the sides of the cartridges even though the sponge
inside do not have enough ink left to print with. Epson ink is not as
liquid as HP's. I know I have changed HP cartridges and you can tell they
are empty. Epson uses a drier ink so you do not tend to get the bleed from
one color to another like you do with wetter inks.
----------------------------------------
Mary also explained:
The test page should have two instances of black on the first row and then
print another row that contains 3 colors, magenta, yellow, and cyan. They
may not necessarily be in that order. You should definitely keep cleaning
your print heads. Do a cleaning cycle then print the nozzle check pattern.
By printing the nozzle check pattern after every cleaning, it causes the
printer to clean more aggressively the next time it is cleaned. Continue
this cycle, cleaning the nozzles and then printing the nozzle check pattern.
You should start to see some of the lines start to print. I went on
vacation for 3 weeks this summer and forgot to turn off the printer. When I
got back it wouldn't print anything. I had to clean the nozzles and print
nozzle test patterns until the nozzles finally cleared and it started to
print.
I think you will find that almost all ink jet printers should be turned off
on the printer. This allows the printers to park the cartridges and print
heads to keep them from clogging with dried ink. Epson is very adamant
about turning the printer off by the printer, not by some other switch or
unplugging the printer. The reason is due to the fact that the nozzles are
located on the printer not on the print cartridge. Cleaning the print heads
uses ink so you may need new cartridges by the time you get it cleaned. I
the cleaning cycles won't clean the color print head you can try cleaning
the nozzles yourself, but I would only do this as a last resort and if the
printer is not under warranty anymore.
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I was having problems with another page, and sent this to Mary, who
explained that it was not a printer problem, but an Internet Explorer 5
problem:
The AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold page you have been trying to print, prints the same
way for me. IE5 does not scale the page to fit the paper like some programs
do and does not allow you to scale the page to fit. I have programs that do
allow me to do this when printing but IE5 doesn't. I have Word 2000 and was
able to open the page in word and have it print scaled to the page, but I
don't know if previous versions of Word allow you to do this or not. I also
was not able to select which frame to print, these options were grayed out
and therefore not useable. This is not a problem with your printer.
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I had been lazily not bothering to switch off the printer, but simply
unplugging it. Mary said that this was not a good idea:
Even though you can not hear the heads move they are set over a pad which is
normally somewhat damp. The heads are sitting above the pad when the
printer is on. When you shut the printer off from the printer switch the
printer heads drop down just enough to touch the pad and keep the print
heads moist and clean.
-----------------------------------------
I was also having trouble printing webpages - the pages were printing
without graphics, and going over the margins so that the right-hand half of
each line would be missing. I sent Mary a page I'd been trying to print,
about BIOS settings.
Mary said:
The page about Bios settings may not print correctly even if you get the
color working unless you enable "printing background color and images" if
you are using IE5. To enable this setting open IE5, go to "Tools", select
"internet Options" from the drop down menu, select the "advanced" tab.
Scroll down to "Printing" and select "Print background colors and images",
click on "Apply" then click on OK. This should enable background printing
of color.
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PCBUILD's List Owner's:
Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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