Old Scanners X-64 drivers -- Works for almost all

jimbo45

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Hi there

I was reading on W7 Forums about people having problems finding drivers (especially X-64) for old photo scanners etc.

Well if you have older but still excellent Photo scanners - don't throw them away. You could run them in an XP Virtual machine of course - another way is to BUY VUESCAN which supports almost every known scanner on the planet

-- but IMO the easiest way is simply to run them from LINUX -- OPENSUSE 13.1, Linux Mint, DEBIAN and UBUNTU all work with a huge number of scanners. Both x-86 and x64 versions work -- I'd choose the X-64 these days. All totally FREE software.

Here's an image of a quick test scan made by my long since unsupported Canonscan 1240U excellent high quality scanner -- also does film negatives etc -- I've still got 100's of old photo negs I want to "digitize" when I can get round to it -- and a load of slides too.

I booted up Linux (OPENSUSE 13.1 X-64) from an external HDD attached to a docking station on the Surface Pro 3 and also had the scanner plugged in to a USB port on the docking station. !!!

Also works on a Linux VM on a W8.1 Host or running a Native Linux on a laptop etc.

Install SANE and XSANE (Front end GUI) on your distro (SANE is usually installed by default but check) and then simply start XSANE. You can also use things like The GIMP and import the image. Linux seems to have a Generic TWAIN driver -- I suspect the paid software VUESCAN does something like that too.

Cheers
jimbo
 

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I'd also recommend using a linux distro in either Virtualbox, any other virtualization software or setting up a dual boot system. I started learning linux a while ago and I have never since regretted it. Not that I want to replace Windows by linux but it is very handy to have a second os at hand, especially if it's free as it is the case with linux. Linux is great to run old hardware but sometimes fails to run the latest and greatest. But in general nowadays hardware support of linux is very good. The only disadvantage is the fact that in most cases the additional features Windows drivers offer (some settings etc.) are not available in linux. But hey, the important thing about a scanner is that it scans :p No need for all those fancy extra features almost nobody uses anyway.
 

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