Scanners

Ever since Bob upgraded his PC, I haven't had a scanner. He upgraded to a newer version of Windows--XP? I don't know, but I think that was it, and the scanner wouldn't work anymore, and there weren't any new drivers to be had for it. The scanner--not a terribly expensive one, but still--was suddenly just a large paperweight.

It was inconvenient, anyway, because it was connected to Bob's computer, so any time I needed to scan something, I had to go upstairs and use the PC, and it doesn't have Photoshop on it, so I'd have to save the image and email it to myself, then open it on my Mac to edit it. Better than nothing, certainly, but not very convenient. And I never wanted to bother him when he was in the office, even though he wouldn't have minded, of course. But I ended up saving stuff and trying to do it all at once on the weekends or something, and it was just very unsatisfactory.

Until I lost the ability completely, which became even more unsatisfactory.

So on Friday night I stopped at Best Buy and bought one of the all-in-one machines--scanner, copier, printer. I've never had a printer, I seldom have the need for one, but I'm sure I'll find uses for it now that I have it. And we've neede a copier--Bob uses his fax machine as a copier, so he'll get some good out of that, too.

I had a TON of stuff to fax for a website that I was finishing up this weekend, so I was able to take care of that, and thank goodness I did, because it's broken now. Yes, the scanner lasted all of, um, three days.

Now, I can't swear that it's irretrievably broken, but it sure seems to be. It's noisy--makes those little scanner-like "whir, whir" noises at irregular, closely-spaced intervals, and it's right by my desk, and it was driving me bonkers by startling me at odd moments, so after I mentioned it to Bob for maybe the tenth time, he went over and turned it off, and when I decided I wanted to use it again, and turned it on, every scan is a solid, very brilliant color, either green, or red, or, currently, blue.

I tried everything I could think of last night, I turned it off and on again, rebooted the Mac, eventually uninstalled and reinstalled the software. I moved the scanner as far as I could away from the monitor after reading a tip on some website or other--of course, I could only move it to the length of the USB cord, which wasn't very far. Finally, after searching the company's website in vain for information, I sent off an email to tech support. They responded today with the extremely useful information that I should clean the scanner glass! Now why didn't I think of that??

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