My Mum's Epson Stylus 680 printer wouldn't print, it would just flash a red light, no indication of what it wanted. The printer properties are supposed to show how much ink is in each cartridge but these have never worked under Windows XP when using the default printer drivers. I got my brother to install the proper printer drivers but still no joy. I looked on the Epson site and found the 'Epson Status Monitor' and installing this did the trick: the printer properties now show how much ink is in the cartridge and attempting to print brings up a clear message: colour cartridge is out of ink. Being a con, it won't print black and white documents with the colour cartridge empty.
I have an Epson with default windows drivers here at home and that cannot tell me if the printer is out of ink so I should install the status monitor here. Odd that the drivers do not include it, they just show a greyed-out diagram of how full the cartridges are.
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