EPSON matrix printer missing from printers&devices

[wartburg]

Dear All,

recently I got a "good old" Epson FX1050 9-pin matrix printer for printing self copy paper protocols.
As it is an obsolete printer, no Win7 driver support is available for it on Epson support homepage.

However, it is in the built-in printer list in Windows 7, so I installed the printer choosing "Epson FX series 1 (136)" from Epron printer list. (The other possibility was "Epson FX series 1 (80)".

The printer works fine (parallel port), but still missing from "devices & printers" list.
However, it is in the printer list of MS Word (2007).

How can it be?
What to do to make visible the printer in the "devices & printers" list?

Thanks in advance
Peter

 

[Berton]

Could be that the printer can't tell the computer about itself, quite common with the old printers [should have been around in MS-DOS/ Windows 3.xx days when programs such as WordPerfect had to include their own printer drivers, Windows 95 started changing that]. An improvement with parallel-port printers was when they could use IEEE1284 Bi-Directional cables and ports but the cable had to be marked as such.