How to establish a connection between Espon SX600 Printer and it’s driver in System Preferences

[Chirag@LA]

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I just brought a new Espon SX600 printer but could hardly use it since it’s here. One or the other hardware issue I tell you. Finally when I happened to resolve all of them from the customer service agents at their end; now it has started troubling me with a brand new issue which is way too annoying and disturbing. Imagine buying a new printer and after a hard set of efforts you are left with a command by the system that it cannot connect to the driver installed only. Isn’t that a bit of too much? Whenever Apple does its automated search thing, it refuses to get detected. I am talking about the software of well pronounced as it’s driver. It has come to me as part of 1.4 gig that is downloadable from the website. I don’t understand how to install the driver for the printer. How to make the System Preference check out in the directory rather than taking all the pain of going online? When I check the System Preferences, it shows that there exists a software for this purpose with Apple and it can be easily downloaded from the company site. I even tried doing that only to read a stupid messages stating: “The software/driver is not available for download”.

I have going round the mulberry bush since quite a some time now. I download something, connect it to read a connection problem, then I try troubleshooting it by redownloading and there I go again with an entire repetition of process.

Anyways, right now I have downloaded the drivers and software which came as a part of the 1.4 gig. I have rrightly placed them in my Macintosh folder of my system. For easy availability or whatever.
Now, my question is, how am I supposed to establish a connection between my driver and the printer in the System Preferences?

[Denholm]

I understand the level and intensity of you getting annoyed. I totally do! However, talking about a lot many other things like the hardware issues you faced and all, all comes with a solution and assistance from the manufacturer’s end in a very efficient and effective way. However, as soon as the issue comes to the driver, connectivity and operational software errors, the blame game begins and you computer manufacturer starts blaming your OS manufacturer and your OS manufacturer starts blaming your Printer manufacturer and the cycle continues for almost forever simply adding to the annoyance and giving no specific solution to the problem faced.

Anyways, moving to the problem you are currently facing, if in case the drivers are already installed what you can probably do is select which of the Postscript Printer definition (PPD) to use. This can be done using the ‘Print Using’ menu which becomes available while we attempt to add the printer to the system’s printer list. Also, ‘Select Printer Software’ menu leads you to a list of installed drivers.

[Gameli]

I am unable to understand what you are actually going through. As in, I understand the issue and the problem that you are basically facing but what is confusing me is the cause of the issue that you are reporting to face. What I mean is that, in case the correct driver is correctly downloaded and installed, the system and the driver is capable of identifying each other automatically without any support of 3rd part interference. This thing remains true even if the driver is totally valid for more than one printer. If the driver is properly installed, it is suspicious, how come the printer and the system is not able to find and identify each other?

However, chucking my suspicions, have you tried connecting the driver manually? Try doing that!

[Chirag@LA]

Even I have had the same suspicion, not me actually but my wife. If I have installed the driver properly, what on earth is the issue with it being detected automatically? If it is not supposed to be detected automatically then why is there the auto detection thing at the first place?

Talking about manual connection and installation, I think you should be reading the question again as I have very clearly mentioned I am not even aware about the manual installation and downloading thingy, keep away connecting it.
So, since you have suggested it, could I please request you to help me go through the entire installation and connection process?

[Gameli]

Certainly! But to start with, I will explain you how to install a driver, connection is not a very complicated process. I don’t want to confuse you by explaining everything in the first Go! After installation let me know we can go ahead with the connection
This is not a very complicated task as such and you can easily go ahead with the installation process using the following steps.

• Before installing a print driver or rather any driver, remember to quit all other running programs or applications.
• Also, keep the installation instruction guide handy and if there arises any confusion in the steps, follow the instructions mentioned there and not here. Since these instructions are quite generic and those will be more specific to your system.
• To start with the process, you need to go on the start button and click over it to see a number of options to chose from
• Among all the options mentioned here, you should be interested in the ‘Settings’ button, click on it
• Here, you will be headed to a number of iconned tabs, among this you need to select the control panel tab
• Here too, you will be accessible to a number of things to chose from, but we are interested in ‘Printers and Faxes’. Select it
• In Printers and Faxes, you will find a button which says ‘Add Printer’. You may select that
• Selection of this button should be leading you to another window called the ‘Add printer Wizard’
• If everything mentioned on this wizard looks fine to you and you don’t mind going ahead, click Next
• Here, you will find a radio button near ‘Local Printer’ click on it to select it
• Check and confirm that the checkbox next to ‘Automatically detect and install’ is unchecked
• Again, confirming all selections to be right, pass on the news to the wizard by clicking on Next
• After this you will be headed to a window where you need to select a Printer Port

o In case your port is attached to the computer, you can click on the ‘Use the following port’ from where you have the privilege to select the port which you are aware where your printer is exactly attached to
o If your aim is just to keep Powerpoint happy, you should be choosing LPT1: or FILE:. This is of no concern because, this is a dummy set up and you are not in any plans to use the port to print anything
o If what you want to do is, to install a local driver but to use it to print in a network printer, then you should be searching for the printer’s port on the network and select that. This is if it is available. There might possibly be chances of it not being available in such a case, you can simply chose LPT1: for now and change the settings later

• To go ahead with the installation process of the driver, click Next and move to the next window
• This window is nothing but the window where you will actually be installing your software in the computer

o If at all you are installing a real printer, you can select the manufacturer and the model of the printer out here
o If at all, you have the installation disk or CD that comes when you buy the printer and is included in the package itself, click on the ‘Have Disk’ option, post which you need to locate the information file(INF file) that comes with the printer. If you are looking out for any specific information or don’t know how to locate it, refer the Printer’s documentation

• When you are done with the installation selection page, you can go ahead for which you need to click on ‘Next’
• The next window takes you to a screen which gives you an option of selecting a name for the printer
• Here, you will be presented with a textbox where you need to enter your name of the printer. Remember whenever you need to use any of these printers or drivers in future, it will be referred by this name only! Keep your memory strong.
• After which, you should be clicking ‘Yes’ when asked ‘Do you want to use this printer as the default printer’
• To go ahead with finishing the installation process, you need to click Next button which you’ll find below
• This window is the ‘Print Sharing’ wizard, where you need to edit the sharing settings of your printer with other systems.
• It is not advisable to share the printer, for that click on the ‘Do not share this printer’ radio button
• Click next and navigate yourself to the ‘Print Test Page’ where you will be testing the printout
• If you wish to go ahead with the test, select Yes else select No and click on next to go ahead.
• After this, you will be headed to the final page which is the ‘Completing the Add Printer Wizard’ page
• Here, you should be checking all the settings that you mentioned throughout the installation process
• In case you need to edit any of the choices, you can click back and edit them, this is not advisable, but!
• To complete the installation process and after confirming all settings press finish to mark its end

P.S: In certain cases, you might not see the "Use this printer as the default printer" in the "Name printer" screen, for which you can simply finish the entire installation process then click on the start button, go to settings, move to the control panel, select the printers and faxes tab, rightclick the just installed printer and select the "Set as default printer" from the pop-up menu that appears.

If at all, after a point of time, you find the need of testing the printer you just installed, you can print a test page to do so. This is done to check and confirm that the printer is working correctly and as desired. For this you need to follow the below steps:
Click on the start button, go to settings, move to the control panel, select the printers and faxes tab, rightclick the printer that you wish to test. This will invoke appearance of a dialog box from which you need to choose properties
From the dialog box that follows, click on the ‘Print test page’ button. This will start the printing process.
After the printing process ends and the page is correctly printed, please check the following data in it.

Computer name: this should be the name of the computer with which the printer is attached or the driver is installed. It should be exactly the same as your computer's name. In case, the name shown is something else only, then the printer driver is NOT locally installed.
Printer name: this should be the name that was assigned by you when the installation process of the driver was on; In case, the name shown is something else only, maybe something like \\Computername\Printername, the driver's installed on the network and not on your PC. Then all you can do is to remove the network version and install a local driver instead.