The Epson TM-T88IV thermal receipt printer is commonly used in restaurants everywhere. It is also known as a “kitchen printer” because of its rugged durability and tolerance for heat, it is regarded as a very dependable workhorse printer.
I recently had one of my "fix my computer" appointments for a restaurant customer of mine in the local area. They had been using an Epson TM-T88III thermal receipt printer as a networked bar printer. It eventually wore out due to wear from years of service in a busy restaurant. I found a decent deal on an Epson TM-T88IV thermal ethernet receipt printer on eBay, so the restaurant manager and I agreed to buy it. It arrived nearly a week later so I returned to the restaurant to set it up on their Local Area Network (LAN).
After connecting the new printer to the LAN's ethernet cable, I went into the “Devices And Printers” section of the Windows 7 laptop computer where I was going to set it up on. I then clicked on the “Add a printer” link at the top of the screen to install it as a network printer. I had already installed the Epson printer driver for this model, so I just figured this part would be a piece of cake – not so! I waited and waited for the IP address of the soon to be networked bar printer to appear in the list of detected printers but to no avail. With the old Epson TM-T88III printer, we had been using an assigned IP address of 192.168.1.222 to make it work on the local network.
Then I realized I had to get the 192.168.1.222 IP address into the new receipt printer I was trying to set up. I began doing some research online and found I could print the internal settings of the Epson TM-T88IV printer by pressing down on the printer's “Feed” button as I powered on the printer. That worked fine and I discovered from the subsequent printout that this printer's IP address was set to 192.168.192.168. That would explain why it had not appeared in the list of detected printers when I was using the “Add a printer” utility. All the other IP addresses on the LAN were 192.168.1.”some number”.
After doing some more research on the internet, I discovered a free utility from Epson I could download that would let me configure a new IP address in the printer's internal settings. The utility is called “EPSON TMNet WinConfig”, and it's easy to install. Upon clicking the installed program icon, it will detect the IP addresses of all printers on your LAN and display them in the right hand pane of the program screen. Next, you can select the IP address you want to change with the mouse and then click the “Configuration” button at the bottom. Now a screen titled “Network Interface Card Properties” will appear. Here you simply key in the new IP address you want to assign (192.168.1.222 in my case) to the Epson TM-T88IV printer and then click the OK button. Also make sure that it is configured for the same subnet mask and default gateway as your LAN. Next, you should see a progress bar appear that lets you know the new settings are being transmitted to your Epson TM-T88IV printer.
Now the printer should be ready to install on your computer. Just run the “Add a printer” utility under the “Devices And Printers” section of the PC and it should detect the new IP address of the Epson TM-T88IV printer. I specified 192.168.1.222 for the IP address when I used the “EPSON TMNet WinConfig” utility and this time it did appear in the list of detected printers for the Windows 7 “Add a printer” utility. Then I just followed the subsequent steps to install it and I was home free!
This story is a good example of how technical snafus can be resolved with a little thought and resourcefulness rather than spending hundreds of dollars to have the problem taken care of by a pricey IT pro.