EPSON Epson TM 220PD Receipt Printer

Warning to those using Epson TM 220PD receipt printer for POS system
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If you buy a Epson TM 220PD printer in South Asia, you have to go to Epson
website to find the driver like a detective.

You need to register as a user at the Epson website and then search for the
right driver. And if your printer still does not work properly
hard luck for you because Epson does not entertain email enquiry - at least
from South Asia. I email them but no reply.

Luckily I finally managed to find the somewhat compatible right driver
ATM_304SA.exe - a generic driver for 220 series - which works okay after
trying several configurations and reboots after the setup.

But there is more to all these.

The said Epson driver has a memory leak. I traced to the exe file
EPStsSrv.exe in the Windows\System32 directory. It eats up as high as 100%
of 'CPU Usage' as shown in the Task Manager. The computer slows to a crawl.

Only by uninstalling the driver would the memory be released. But then if
you are using the Epson printer, that's not possible.

And the best part is that after uninstalling the driver - that is if you are
not using the Epson receipt printer any more - the EPStsSrv.exe still runs
on Windows startup. Add to that another Epson file ESDusBMon.exe also
continues to run on startup despite unloading at Run > Msconfig.

The only good thing is that after uninstalling the printer driver, at the
least the memory leak is no there any more. There is probably another hidden
program - perhaps a DLL - that is running in the background when the Epson
printer driver is installed.

What a crap service and software from an otherwise brand name. Its software
looks more like a virus that kills your computer.

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