By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

HP ScanJet 5370 Last month under the title USB Woes I mentioned how installing a USB 2.0 card caused me to lose my HP ScanJet 5370 C scanner and what I had to go through to get it back. Well, the scanner is functioning fine in normal flatbed mode. In fact, the Looking Back to 1993 article on page 9 was scanned in from an old newsletter using that scanner. But another problem has developed. What sort of month would it be without a new problem? There would be nothing to write about.

The HP ScanJet 5370 C scanner comes with a five inch by five inch transparency adapter so that you can scan transparencies or large negatives. (See http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2001/january2001/ScanJet5370 Cse.htm for a photo of the scanner along with my original article about it.) In fact, scanning large negatives is the only reason I bought the scanner. It seemed like an economical way to scan the many large negatives I had of old family photos and the newer 6 cm x 7 cm negatives I had taken in years past. My HP PhotoSmart film scanner would only process 35 mm negatives, and the older HP iicx 14 inch flatbed scanner had no adapter to scan any negatives.

Unfortunately, I think, my negative scanning days with this scanner are done. After two years, I can no longer get the software to go into photographic negative mode. When working correctly, if you want to scan a negative, you put the negative on the scanner and place the transparency adapter on top of it. You then tell the software to use the transparency adapter, and the scanner turns off the normal scanning light and turns on the light in the transparency adapter. That still works, However, the option in the software to go into photographic negative mode stays grayed out—and nothing I tried like reinstalling the software, reinstalling the scanner, etc. did any good. So I sprung for a $25 talk with HP only to be told that it was a hardware problem, and the only solution is a new scanner.

I find it hard to believe it is a hardware problem, but in my research I have seen others say that HP told them the same thing. I think if the software were written properly that everything would be OK since other scanning software I have, called VueScan, can produce a pretty good result. It is a much better result than the HP software produces in just transparency mode. Unfortunately the VueScan software’s result is not quite acceptable and my email correspondence with the author of VueScan failed to produce a solution. He answered one email, then no more. He is apparently harassed by too much email from the many people who have bought his software, and I got lumped into the group that are worth only one email.

So, I have a problem. I have, perhaps, 200 large negatives of my own still to scan, and I may come by more in the future from family members. I would like to eventually digitize these images. I have basically two options if I want to do that. Buy another HP flatbed scanner that has a large transparency adapter—a $300 - $500 proposition—which I am loath to do since I think they have made a defective item. Or I can buy a regular negative scanner that will accommodate large negatives—probably close to a $1,000 proposition. At present I am going to do nothing, since none of these negatives has to be scanned at this moment, and hope that an economical solution presents itself in the future.

Internet Explorer Problems What do you do when you need to download something from the Internet and your browser is kaput?

This all started, I think, with the installation of the .Net Framework on my laptop. You need to install the .Net Framework (the installation executable is 20.8 MB) in order to run programs written in any of Microsoft’s new .Net languages. The installation went fine, only noting that my computer had an old version of the commctrl.dll which would be replaced with a correct version after I rebooted. After a reboot, I installed a program that I had written in Visual Basic .Net. Parts of it ran fine until I needed to access the accompanying database. Then I got the message that .Net required MDAC 2.6 or higher, that’s Microsoft Data Access Components. I had MDAC 2.7 ready and waiting, so I installed it along with Jet 4.0, and my new application ran perfectly on the laptop.

Many people have objected to the size of the .Net Framework installation, but once it is installed it makes the .Net program installations much smaller, and eventually it will become part of many things that Microsoft installs, so it will automatically be on your computer.

What does this all have to do with Internet explorer (IE). Maybe nothing, but after all of the above I tried to access the Internet with IE and received an empty browser window with a message of Done in the status bar. Trying different URLs didn’t help. A shut down and a reboot of the computer produced the same problem. I tested my Internet connectivity with ping and tracert. Everything was fine. It appeared that IE 5.5 was damaged, but how do you go to Microsoft’s site to get a new version if your browser doesn’t work. The solution was that there was an old version of Netscape Navigator still on the laptop. Feeling guilty, I used Navigator to go to the Microsoft site and install IE 6.0. In retrospect, I think I could have just used another computer to download the small setup program you put on your desktop and then clicked on to do the actual download and installation, transferred that program to the laptop and then ran the setup program. u