Looking for an Epson printer reset solution.

January 30, 2012 7:27 PM

My 6 year old Epson C87 printer works fine. However Epson thinks I need to get a a new one. Anyone aware of a reset hack/trick for mac OS?

My 6 year old Epson C87 printer works fine. However Epson thinks I need to get a a new one. Anyone aware of a reset hack/trick for mac OS?
While in process of doing some printing my printer shows the followinf error."PARTS INSIDE YOUR PRINTER ARE NEAR OR AT THE END OF THERE LIFE?"
I see there are many non mac fixes. I am looking for an OSX solution.
Any hive experience would be a godsend.

posted by citybuddha to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Do you have VMware Fusion or Parallels on your machine to run Windows? If so, you could connect the printer USB device to the Windows virtual machine and run a tool like the SSG Service Utility in Windows to reset it. (I'm assuming you're on an Intel Mac here.)

If you don't, then it's possible to do this at least somewhat legitimately:
1) Download VMware Fusion 4 for the 30-day free trial.
2) Download a Windows 7 image from Microsoft's official online distributor, Digital River. (Google for "legal download from digitalriver" and take the first hit.) You can install Windows 7 in VMware Fusion and use it for 30 days without needing a key.

Then use the process above.

Unfortunately, it's fairly unlikely that anyone has written an OSX tool to do the printer reset that you need, so it's going to have to be Windows one way or another. Alternately, do you know anyone with a Windows machine that you could plug the printer into temporarily to run the fix?
posted by McCoy Pauley at 8:04 PM on January 30, 2012