Windows Vista and Epson EPL-5900L

My first post and I’m ranting about Vista! I have been recently approached by my mother-in-law (who loves Vista – particularly the Sidebar) as her beloved laser printer wouldn’t work with Vista. Checking Epson’s web site for a Vista driver all I could find was a comment stating that this printer wasn’t supported on Vista. Ah, the joys of Vista! So, I thought why not try to install the latest XP driver on Vista. However, this didn’t work. While the driver seemed to have installed correctly when I tried to print anything all I got were weird error messages (“ebapi not found …”). Mhm, a different approach was needed and here’s how I finally succeeded (I can’t guarantee that this will work for anyone else):

  1. If you have installed the XP driver on Vista – remove it!
  2. Go to http://esupport.epson-europe.com/ and select, “Laser Printers”, “EPL-5900L” and “Windows XP”
  3. Go to “Drivers & Software” (here’s a link to that site: http://tinyurl.com/5td3ko) and download “Silent Driver (3.3.2fl)” (which is a .zip file)
  4. Extract the zip file to wherever you like on your hard drive
  5. In Vista, go to the Control Panel->Printers, select “Add a printer”.
  6. Then select “Local Printer”, choose “USB” as your local printer port and when asked to select the printer make and model select “Have Disk”
  7. Browse to the directory where you extracted the driver in step 4 and select the EPT0252E.INF file
  8. If Windows then tells you that it already found a driver for this printer go for the Overwrite option
  9. Voilà! All that’s left to do is to print the test page to make sure the printer is working correctly

Update: This procedure appears not to work for the 64bit version of Windows Vista.  I’m also getting reports that this procedure works for Windows 7 too. I have no access to Windows 7 and therefore can’t verify that. You have been warned.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Windows Vista and Epson EPL-5900L”

  1. mao Says:
    January 12, 2008 at 3:24 pm | Reply

    thanks! :) it worked.

  2. Roel Says:
    December 31, 2008 at 11:47 am | Reply

    This suggested solution does not work on Vista -64. Maybe those who reported positive results has Vista 32-bit mode. I tried the above-mentioned solution under 64-bit Vista and got negative results.

    • 24alpha Says:
      December 31, 2008 at 11:52 am | Reply

      This is true – this was done on the 32bit version of Vista. It is quite likely that it will fail on the 64bit version. Thanks for letting me know.

  3. Nikolas Says:
    August 30, 2009 at 12:07 pm | Reply

    Hi! Any ideas how to get this 5900l working on windows 7 32-bit? these instructions don’t work :/ (they did on vista, so thanks for that!)

  4. Scalpel Says:
    September 9, 2009 at 10:15 am | Reply

    In Win7.Ultimate.x86 ver 7600.16385.090713-1255, go to the Control Panel->View devices and printers, right click on “Epson EPL-5900L Advanced”, select printer properties, click “OK”, select advanced, set “print direcfly to the printer”.

    It worked!

  5. TPM Says:
    October 1, 2009 at 7:04 pm | Reply

    Got it working in Windows 7 32-bit, exactly the instruction you gave for Vista!

  6. osten Says:
    October 18, 2009 at 9:04 pm | Reply

    Yes, it works on Windows 7 x86!
    Thank you for solution of this last issue with transition to W7. Epson’s support sucks as usual.

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