Sunday, June 1, 2008

Parts inside your printer are at the end of their service life…Epson Printer error

Epson Stylus C41 UX Printer gives this error after printing 8000 pages (As of my experience). No need to throw the printer, you can very well rejuvenate it. Printer manufacturer hide this fact from you.
Few days back I encountered an interesting problem. The problem was with my 3-4 year old Epson stylus C41 UX inkjet printer. The printer had been working fine without any sign of any kind of error. I usually pay enough attention towards its preventive maintenance.

One fine day, after taking two printouts, the red and green lights of Epson C41UX starts flashing and a message on screen
"Parts inside your printer are at the end of their service life. See your printer documentation.”
I was taken aback. I never heard of such problem earlier. After passing of some time of surprises, I started thinking on this problem. The questions, which rose in my mind, were.
* How do printer come to know that it is a time to call a day? Is there any timer or time stamp in printer?
* Is there any counter, which keeps track of number of printing operations? If so how many prints can one take? What is the value of this counter? Is it mentioned in printer manufacturers documentation? If not Why?
* Is this a trick of printer manufacturer to force user to buy a new printer?
As it was my first experience, I hooked to Google. To my surprise lot of documentation is available for this problem.
I read lot of documentations and finally zeroed down on the following URL.
http://www.hm2k.com/posts/parts-inside-your-printer-are-at-the-end-of-their-service-life
It is extremely useful documentation to solve this problem. I followed as mentioned and finally I was able to revive my printer. Entire procedure is laborious, tricky but one can definitely enjoy it.

To solve this problem one has to download and install Epson SSC service utility a freeware (
http://inkjetprinterhelp.us/sscserve.exe ). With this utility you can reset the all the counters, which keeps track of printing count and reset to zero. Once all counters set to zero you will not get this message and no flashing lights. In other words YOUR PRINTER WILL BE A NEW ONE.

In this process I discovered that you could take maximum 8000 (Eight thousands) printouts, before this message greets you. In my case the counter was reached to 8007.

There is another useful link to solve this problem, but it is very comprehensive
Epson printer problem by
Richard (11/15/03 8:26 AM)
http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/inkjet/14116.

Happy Printing
****** Read Other Popular Posts ******
1.Installing XP over preinstalled Vista for Dual boot: Vista will not boot
2.Prevent, Block, Disable use of USB flash / Pen / hard disk drives
3.Usage of USB drive to boost Vista with ReadyBoost

Post your Views

No comments: