Digital BW, The Print

My 1280 has been acting peculiar recently:  the red maintenance light will sometimes come 
on when I try to do a nozzle check and I get the "general printer error, check for foreign 
objects, etc." message, which could (until now) be cleared by restarting the printer one or 
more times. Today it began making loud (really loud) grinding and banging noises. The feed 
mechanism in the back also spins periodically. The red (maintenance) light comes on and 
stays on.

I'll call Epson on Monday, but obviously I'll need to ship the printer to a service center. 
(Unfortunately I'm a few months past the one-year warrenty period.)

My question is this:  presumably I'll need to remove the ink carts, but I know that if I do only 
that the inks (UT2) left in the heads will dry up and form serious clogs.  How should I flush 
the heads before shipping? I have some empty carts on hand; should I put some Windex in 
the carts and try to run a purge pattern? If Windex is the right approach, should I use the 
version of Windex with ammonia or without?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Jim C