Sunday, December 28, 2008

Scanner Installation

Scanner Installation

You will want to consider the following before purchasing a scanner to attach to a PC.
The scanner will need to be attached to the PC via an expansion card. Some scanners offer a serial interface in addition to another interface; however, scanners generate large amounts of data, up to 7 MB or more. You will not want to send all of the data through a serial port because it takes too long. Faster interfaces, such as SCSI or Hewlett-Packard's General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB), or one that is proprietary, will offer better scanner performance.

Does the machine to which you are planning to add the scanner have adequate expansion slots? Is an IRQ available? If you are adding a scanner to an 8-bit machine, IRQ 2 is a good starting point, because some network and video adapters use this IRQ. When adding a scanner to a 16-bit machine, try using the interrupts above IRQ 8.
In addition to finding an available IRQ, you will have to find an available I/O port. First, try using the address suggested by the manufacturer of the scanner. If you find you have a conflict in the I/O ports, you will have to find another address that works.

When installing a scanner, you may want to test it before reassembling the case of the PC. If you have problems and need access to the inside of the PC, the case will already be removed.
As always, exercise EXTREME care when working with a computer with the case removed. Make sure that you follow all safety guidelines discussed in Chapter Two.
After you install the expansion card and make the hardware settings, you will need to install the software to operate the scanner.

Before loading the scanner's software, make a backup copy of both the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so you will have a record of them before the scanner software is installed. You will need to make changes to the config.sys file to add a device driver. This change may be made automatically by the scanner's installation software. You will need to reboot the computer for the changes to take effect.

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