I had lots of trouble with Vuescan yesterday, but attributed it to my
recent hard disk failure then upgrade, change from Win98 to Win98SE, and rebuild
of my software. This is with a Scanwit and 192MB RAM.
I had many crashes, not on opening Vuescan, but during operation. I tried
versions 7.0.21, 25, 26, 27 and 7.1, with careful expunging of the previous one
each time. With odd exceptions, I was unable to do a strip of 6 scans without a
full-scale hang, usually on the focus step of the second to fifth frame. I had
to run Scandisk many times, and finally a total lockup caused my machine
to want a surface scan. When I eventually allowed it, it took 8.5 hours to
complete (40GB), so I'm not happy.
Before my recent upgrade, I had lately found Vuescan very stable, (up to
V7.0.21), even when PaintShopPro was running as well. A further confusing issue
is my recent upgrade from PSP7 to PSP7.02. I suspect PSP may have become more of
a memory hog, in pursuit of greater stability (for itself). However, several of
my crashes occurred with everything but Vuescan shut down. It's possible I'd
never tried 6 continuous scans with PSP 7.02 before.
Interestingly, in most, but not all, of yesterday's failures, the scanner
did a single uninterrupted pass, instead of its usual curious behaviour where it
stops every 15% or so, steps back 1mm or so, and then restarts. It has been like
that since v7.0.15. I asked Ed about it and he told me not to worry, it's just
that the computer can't keep up. It doesn't affect the results.
So, I'm therefore worried that Win98SE's more rigorous checking of things
has slowed things down, altered memory management, etc, so that my old stable
setup is lost forever.
Any ideas, anyone?
Alan T
