SOS for Two Non-Printing 1160s

["Lexi Sundell" <sundell@3rivers.net>]

<x-charset iso-8859-1>First, many thanks to you fine people who usually answer my questions before
I ask them. But today I am in a bad jam.

I have two 1160s. One fitted with a cis and generations inks and I have used
it heavily. It originally was a refurb. The other was bought brand new as a
back up and has not had much use. I have them on a pc with Win2k pro, one
gig Thunderbird Athlon, 768 RAM, two hard drives with plenty of extra space
open on them. They have mostly been connected by usb, and it is the exact
same cable for both of them as I have only one. It remains plugged directly
into the back of the tower, not into a hub. I defragment the drives and
clear out temp files frequently.

The refurb printer has gradually become difficult and then impossible to
use. It began with frequent errors ending printing partway through a page,
ranging from the dreaded communications error to general error (look for
foreign objects) to improper paper loading (that one often when already ¾ of
the way through the page!) and so on. The printer never made the horrendous
screech I once heard it make when some cat fur got in there, but when I got
the foreign objects error I cleaned it till I was blue in the face anyway.

I have reinstalled the driver, after properly uninstalling. I have done hard
memory resets as Epson support told me. I have given up on usb and installed
it as parallel. That worked for about 5 pages. I put it back on usb. I have
had it as the only printer installed. I have had it as the first 1160
installed with the other one as copy two. I have had it as copy two with the
other one as the first one. I have bypassed spooling to print directly to
the printer. It consistently has not worked no matter what combination of
things I tried.

Since the newer unit printed just fine, I thought it could not be the system
and had to be the printer itself. On Friday Epson support over the phone
concluded it probably had a bad logic board. As it is out of warranty I
ordered a 1280 to replace it.

Then, last night as I was trying to run out the last cartridge before
switching the cis to it, the newer 1160 began doing all the things I have
been through with the refurb. EEEEK! It will not print a whole page although
I have had it printing about 150 pages of heavy image data in the past few
days with no particular problems. I have done everything I can think of. I
also called a tech friend in Seattle who thinks I may have a spooling
problem in the system, since these printers will print simple text pages. It
is on large image files, sometimes not that large, only 6 or 7 mb, that I
have the problem.

So I sit here with orders unfilled for our giclee prints, a show coming up
next weekend for which I need brochures and cards printed, and I don't even
know if I can expect the new 1280 arriving Tuesday to work!

Just to test the system a bit, I turned on my old 850 and printed a graphic
file with no problem. It runs on parallel.

Does anyone know how to fix my 1160s????? Even one of them???? I really love
that printer model, but I am about to rip my hair out. If you have any
ideas, please email me directly as I am on the digest.

Thanks,

Lexi


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