printer doesn't work

My brother gave me his Epson stylus photo 1270. When I try to print something, the printer does nothing. When I double click the printer icon in the systray, it shows one of two things:

1. The document has status "printing" and the size field says something like "982/984 bytes"
2. The status field is blank and the size says, for example, "984 bytes"

If I right-click the print job and click cancel, the status changes to "Deleting - Printing" and stays like that for a very long time, until it is finally deleted. I downloaded the latest driver, but that didn't help at all.