I loved the print quality and couldn’t wait to see that photo paper go through the printer …. The EX must have felt the same way, because after a few perfect prints it started showing some very strange behaviour: After printing between ¼ and ¾ of a page, it abruptly aborted the print, ejected the paper and started pulling in and ejecting more pages. 

I was mad. Then again, for a few prints, everything was fine, my mood was improving to almost happiness, and then - same thing again. The spitting printer, some serious digestive disorder ! (or some rare form of Epsonitis ?)
 

In the following weeks I checked with epson service, updated drivers, uninstalled driver, re-installed drivers, changed applications, checked with service, bought new cable, re-installed Win95 (!), upgraded to Win98 (!!), sent printer for repair, read newsgroups, posted in newsgroups, installed parallel card…and pulled a lot of my hair - still the Epson EX kept spitting.  But during this time I became a bit knowledgeable on the subject and now have a workaround and a fix for it, which I want to share. 

Symptoms: Ejecting prints (only large, photographic prints) before they are completed. Then pulling in more sheets (if there are any in the feeder) and usually just ejecting them without any printing. Sometimes also printing garbage characters on these sheets.

Possible Causes?
 

• Insufficient Disk Space on your C:drive: This printer needs a lot of space for temporary spool files, you should have several hundred MB free on your C: drive, since by default these files are created in the c:\windows\temp directory. 
 
It is defined in the WIN.INI file:
([EPSON Stylus Photo EX]
PrnSpoolPath=c:\windows\temp


I have not tried it, but it should be possible to redirect it to a different drive by changing this entry. (it works Volker, I tried it recently: kok leong)

• Corrupted Swapfile: I have read this in a newsgroup, I believe from a Mac-User. Problem was solved by deleting the swap-file. How this might work under Win95/98 I am not quite sure, possible by disabling virtual memory, re-booting and enabling it again.

• Fragmented harddrive: Just run Defrag and see if it helps.

• Bad printer cable: There is a lot of data being sent to your printer at quite a high speed and some of the older and cheaper cables cannot cope. Get a new, not to cheap (mine cost about S$ 15 (I paid S$25 for mine! Kok leong) bi-directional (IEEE 1284) printer cable.

• Incompatibility between your printer port and the EX: This is a very broad subject and could mean many things: Your printer port in the PC is defective or out of spec, or the port on the printer is defective or out of spec, or both are still within spec by themselves, but just on the opposite sides of the range, and thus cannot talk to each other reliably. One of the above was the case with me, which one could only be detected by detailed technical debugging. So what to do ??

Workaround? The problem appears to be the high data rate that the PC sends to the printer when the printer port is configured as Enhanced Communications Port (ECP) , as it is recommended in the manual. To bring down this data rate, you can go to your BIOS setup menu of your computer (check your manual) and change the mode of the parallel port to ‘bi-directional’. Windows should recognise this change when booting and load the correct driver. This will drastically reduce the speed that  the computer can send data to the printer. With this change, in my case, all prints came out perfectly and complete …but: It prints sloooow ! Easily double your previous print time, but still better than only half prints - right ? Epson recommends this as well on their support page in the US. 

If you know your way around in the Windows system settings, simply changing the driver from ECP to standard printer port appears to have the same effect, without going into the Bios set-up. 

Solution? So what if you are not that patient (like myself) and want to wait ages for the paper to reappear ? Get a new PC (or at least a new motherboard) ! That’s what I did (motherboard) and the problem was gone. Sounds a bit drastic, I agree, but that seems to be the only real solution. If two don not get along well (printer and PC)  and you definitely want to keep one (printer), the other one has to go. But before spending some serious money, do some testing to make sure that your new purchase does not (mis)behave in the same way. 

So that is all of my wisdom on the topic. Ah, I forgot one thing: I tried it with a separate I/O card, that claimed to be ECP-compatible. Windows never recognised it as ECP, and only used it in the (slow) printer mode. Maybe there are better ones around, but I could not find any.

I hope this rather lengthy save some of you people from going through the same, frustrating learning curve than I did and save some hair on you head …