24-pin Epson leaves horizontal blank spaces in printing

[aviator]

I have a pretty old 24-pin matrix printer Epson LQ-100 ESC/P2. It worked perfectly for years till yesterday when it started to leave horizontal blank spaces in printed material. I think the problem is not with the printing head because every part of text or graphics is printed - the printer just separates some lines too much.
For example... one row of text is printed correctly and another one with the same text is divided with blank horizontal line, position of blank lines varies in rows but it's the same after every eight row.
I checked and i'm sure it's not a problem with OS or printer connection.
I wonder if that happens because I hitted the printer a bit since I had some other minor problem with printing (omg what a stupid way to try to solve it! )??? After that I pulled paper in and after the first two rows were printed correctly the printer stopped printing the page, then every time I would turn it on it would start to print something in French (maybe help) pulling paper forward and backwards(???) or characters in alphabetical order (parts of the test page?) and I'm emphasizing that every row of text was printed correctly! (Maybe this happened because I pressed button for changing fonts in DOS because I suspected it was jammed?!) I solved that by turning my printer and my computer off and then I realized there's a new problem with printing...

Is there a way to reset some printer settings, I think there's no such option in XP...?
Friends thank you very much in advance, it's urgent!

 

[Josh Kemmer]

Based on the picture attachment you gave, I think the problem is already in the print head. Although the print can print texts, some of the lines are blank. This pattern appears because a some of "dot-punching" part of the print head are not working anymore.

 

[aviator]

Dear friends thank you for your attention, I solved it. No the problem wasn't with the printer head. Maybe I didn't explain well... it has happened that in the middle of printing a text row my printer adds unnecessary vertical space before it continues printing. I heard something about "Automatic line feed" option in default setting which normally should be turned off but I didn't know how to do that. The control panel is pretty poor and I'm not sure if that can be done by pressing buttons so I started too look for some configuration utility. Even Google didn't help me much but I found it somehow finally. The file name is Lq100cfg.exe, I started it and set "Autom. Zeilenvorschub" to "aus" (options are in German) and now everything is ok! I didn't have to enter pure DOS, the program worked in virtual machine with Windows 98, maybe it would work in XP directly but it took more time for the printer to react with a sound signal. Soon I found a link from which it can be downloaded together with other utilities and drivers for some very old printers, so in case anybody needs it here it is:
http://ftp.serdica.org/public/drivers/Printers/older.rar