Printer kablooey

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My ex-wonderful inkjet, an Epson Stylus Color 640, refuses to do anything other than tell me it’s out of paper (incidentally, it’s not).
I’ve reinstalled the drivers, other Epson software, checked the connections a bazillion times, and it still says out of paper. The Epson Status Monitor shows a status of ‘searching’ for a printer; when I tightened the screws connecting the parallel port to the motherboard, and reconnected the cable, it showed the printer as Ready or printing’, but after I tried to actually print something, it reverted to ‘searching’. The manuals offer little to go on (nothing specific) – though it’s barely a year old, I have the feeling it’s time to go a-shoppin’ again. Any suggestions as to what else O might try?

Thanks, as always!

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Don’t know the 640, but have seen on a number of different printer a similar problem caused by the finger of the paper sensor sticking open.

First step I would try is cleaning the printer. Do NOT use compressed air, learned that the hard way. I use a brush out of my camera kit. It has a hand pump to pump air across the surface.

If cleaning doesn’t do the trick, and you think it is the software, then complete remove all software associated with the printer, run Defrag (in case you have a corrupt file, you don’t want to recreate the problem) and re-install the software.

If this doesn’t work try the people you bought the printer from, most suppliers will help in the expectation you will come back in the future.

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Well, I bought the printer at a show about a year ago (and true to form forgot to send in the registration), and I don’t really think it’s software-related. Windows know the printer’s there, and everything about it. All I have to do is find the paper sensor – I tried cleaning residual ink off of the insides, but it’s impossible to reach most of the places inside without taking the entire thing apart, and anyway, the paper feed is separated from the inkjet area, and doesn’t even get to where the ink is, so the ink can’t be the problem in this case. I will call Epson and ask them, but without the printer in front of me I can only expect so much. I’ll update once I’ve called.

dj

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Try the following:

Troubleshooting Tip #0248 False Out-Of-Paper Message

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Tried that the other day – it didn’t work. Epson won’t even tell me where the papere sensor is located unless I am sitting in fromt of the printer and read them the serial number, so they can bill me for the information that should have been included in the manual in the first place.

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When you tried the steps from Epson, did they work at all?

What were your answers to the questions at the top?

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First try printing with the printer directly connected to the computer without any switchbox, Zip drive, scanner or any other parallel port device connected to the same port. If this is the problem then install a second parallel card for LPT2.
Make sure to use a printer cable no longer than 6 feet.

Next make sure your hard disk has plenty of contiguous space 30 – 50MB available to spool the data to be printed. Run Scandisk to make sure there are no crosslinked files and then run Defrag to see if your hard disk needs to be defragmented.

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I’ve gotta tell ya, having purchased and sold umpteen printers over too many years (I’m never telling how many), the first thing to check is the cable. If you don’t have an extra one kicking around, borrow one and worse case buy one, they’re cheap enough. Good luck.

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Well, I guess the guy at Epson wanted to go home last night, because he didn’t bill me for solving my problem. By disconnecting the printer cable at both ends at the same time (something I probably never would have tried) and then reconnecting it, I guess I purged some ‘data’ that was trapped in the cable and causing the erroneous error message. It works fine now!

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I “knew” this, having done the same on a number of occasions. Sorry for the lapse of memory.

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