It seems that the printer had as paper input some sort of Letter dimensions. Once this was changed to A4, it started printing normally (after frustrating me to the max). Also under windows 7, there is a pop up message indicating that the paper size is wrong, on windows xp though such a message didn't pop up making my life difficult. So it seems that changing the default paper size solved the problem. However epson could be a doll and fix this problem by assuming that the default paper size is A4 rather than something else