Scanners.

Hi Ben,

I have an old pentium machine running Windows 95.
I tried to use my HP Scanjet 4400c with it's parallel port interface instead of the USB interface. It was very stubborn, didn't work well at all. I had to keep re-booting the machine to get the scanner to be recognised by the system.

So, I went to the store to get a USB / PCI interface adapter and upgraded W95 to the latest 4.00.950B rev and installed the USB support.

No good. That version of USB does not support scanners. Neither my HP scanner nor my Kodak digital camera would work on that USB connection.

I finally upgraded to W98 and a machine that has built-in USB. All is well now.

Moral of the story... You can use a scanner on an older pentium machine but you have to have a good operating system.

Have fun!!
jim

 

Let me ask you....can't you download a driver for your computer, then also download a patch for the scanner?

I had the opposite problem with my printer. I installed the XP on my computer. Then it seemed nothing would work or be reconized. So I went to microsoft and downloaded and installed 3 drivers. Then I also installed an update patch on the printer and everything works.

It wouldn't work the opposite way? As my son is buying up a bunch of old computers, and is going to be making one computer out of them all. I am just curious.

tee-hee I barely make mine work right. But just wondering?

 

I did not have any problems running old scanner on old computer (Old computer was originally P120, then P200. RAM was 16-32-98 MB. OS was early 95 then 98II).

When I got new box (a monster truck in all departments ) old scanner did not want to know about it with XP. No drivers available for it so just updated that too.

As Jim said Ben, depends a lot on OS. Maybe look at scanners, and search web to see if you would have any driver problems with them before forking out the $$?

Pete

 

Ben, of late I have seen a few shops open up around this way specialising in 2nd hand hardware, might get lucky somewhere like that.

I'ld probably recommend trying to find a new one that your current system will handle though mate. The newer scanners and software bundled with them are capable of more than the old ones. Just depends on how much use you'll be giving it and what for I think.

Pete

[ January 31, 2003, 05:44 AM: Message edited by: Titus2_1 ]

 

hi here is the support page for your scanner
http://www.hp.com/cposupport/prodhome/hpscanjet428447.html
here are the drivers for windows and MAC, nothing earlier than win95 though, if you are running 3.1, oh well!
http://www.hp.com/cposupport/swindexes/hpscanjet428447_swen.html
Linda

 

I thought that was what you had to do Linda.

Sherrie