I have owned my Pavoni Europiccola for over 15 years and have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. It has taken me a long time to get the perfect cup of coffee but now I get perfect results every time. Here are a few tips. Put about a quarter pint of boiling water through the system, with an empty filter and the filter holder in place, before you make your espresso, in order to heat up all the parts of the machine. Buy a proper sized metal tamper and press down the coffee into the filter with a lot of pressure and a rotating motion. Get your coffee out in no more than 25 secs after lifting the handle. Experiment with different coffees. Taylors Espresso from waitrose works best for me.
I have been toying with the idea of buying a Nespresso machine as the machines are very easy to use and the results are good, but I do enjoy the ritual and process/challenge of getting a good coffee from this machine.