Thank you, Art, I may just do that, so I saved a copy of your message.
I'll see if I can get anywhere on my own with that cleaning kit
first, the directions sound simple enough so long as I don't force
anything. If that doesn't work, I'll try to get my e-mail account to
co-operate with me long enough to contact you and try your guide. You
get coolness points for taking the time and effort to make and
distribute that guide - I don't understand why Epson didn't make one
themselves for their older, out-of-warranty printers.
And if that doesn't work, last resort will be the drastic measure of
taking the whole thing apart and soaking the print head in alcohol or
something for a couple days, following one of the more extreme
solutions I've seen to the problem. But at that point I will have
basically considered the printer permanently broken and beyond any
help short of a miracle anyway, so I'd be taking the printer apart
for no other reason than to see what makes it tick.
If at some point you are looking for a relatively safe method for
unclogging Epson Durabrite ink head contact me...
Davy, so far the Cannon looks good, but for the first few months, that
Epson worked flawlessly as well. I hope you're right about not having
the same problems with a Cannon (I don't expect to see the exact same
ink clog problem, anyway, as that seems to be an Epson specific
problem.) For some reason, I had always remembered Cannon printers
as being cheap and disposible, the sort of thing you can get on sale
at Wal-Mart for $30 or so (only to find the print catridges cost
twice as much as the printer.) But my sister swears by her old
Cannon inkjet, and told me yesterday that the only reason she stopped
using it was because it had taken to squeaking when it printed after
three or four years of moderate use - which sounds like the sort of
minor problem a little graphite on the paper feed rollers might fix.
Compared to trying to get a Stylus working again, that's nothing. I
seem to have been mis-judging Cannon; well, anyway, I guess even if I
haven't been mis-judging, they have a lot of work to do before they
begin annoying me as badly as the Epson Stylus printers.
You guys rock - I'll probably spend most of my time here just lurking,
and I wouldn't have said anything at all except it bothered me seeing
people being called names because they were having trouble with their
new printers (I'm sure nobody who wrote those particular messages
meant it the way it sounded, but it bothered me anyway.) I know it
isn't because I'm not taking care of this stuff - my IBM '286 (with a
12mHz processor, 640K of RAM, and 20MB hard drive if I remember
correctly) is still working after all these years, and my Commodore
Vic-20 has been working just fine since around 1984. They just don't
make computers to last like that anymore! This new junk is just being
shoveled out there as quickly as it can be made, and I think the
manufacturers are hoping we upgrade to something newer in a month or
two before the older stuff falls apart on us - that's not consumers
being idiots or fools, mistreating their computers, or failing to
follow directions, it's shoddy workmanship, and in most cases people
who own this junk can only be blamed for buying it. And I think that
most of us wouldn't have bought, for example, an Epson Stylus printer
(or Packard Bell computers, or PC-Chips motherboards, or those
LG-somethingoranother DVD-ROM drives that kick the bucket in about a
year, or those generic junky power supplies I bought once that all
caught on fire within weeks of each other...) - as I was saying, we
can only be blamed for buying these items, and wouldn't have bought
this stuff if we'd known what to expect. If many different people
with different computers are having the exact same problems with a
particular piece of hardware, given a choice between deciding whether
the user is causing the problem or the hardware is to blame I'm
inclined towards suspecting the hardware.
y.
