Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

I have a HP 6100c scanner that worked fine with a computer running Win98se.
A friend gave me a computer that he built, but didn't use anymore. It has a
SOYO SY-7VCA-E motherboard. It had no OS. I installed Win xP Home edition
with service pak 2 on it. I have it just about set up with my files from
the old computer. However, I can not get the scanner operational.

It has a SCSI card that has to be installed in the new machine. I have the
manual and followed the instructions to the better of my knowledge. I went
on the HP website and downloaded the drivers for XP. They appear to be the
same as the ones for win98. That is where my trouble started. I couldn't
find the file that they were unzipped to. I also used the original
installation CD that came with the scanner and couldn't get it to work. XP
didn't recognize the scanner. When I click on the scanner icon in my
computer it says "No SCSI host adapters found" and when I click on scanner
icon it says "No scanner found". I am obviously doing something stupid
again. Is the installation different with XP that it was with 98? I use my
scanner a lot and would hate to be without it.Will you help me get it
installed?

Also, I have a HP printer. {Deskjet 890c}. While on 98se I had double sided
printing option, but under XP, I lost the double sided printing option. I
tried to use the 98 drivers, but XP wouldn't let me. Is there a way I can
force XP to use the 98se drivers so I ca regain the double sided printing
option? I hate not using both sides of the paper when printing. It is such
a waste to me. I prefer it looking more like a book.

Thanks for any help or suggestions with these matters. It has to be
something that is obvious, but I don't have the knowledge to see it.

Thanks.

P.S. I have many of your U&R PC's; the latest being the 17th edition. Is
there a new one? I would like to understand more about the dual core
processors.

RE: the scanner, note that you have two devices here, a SCSI card *and* a
scanner. Each has it's own drivers, and in order to talk to each other,
both must support the ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface - developed
by Adaptec). ASPI is a software standard for communication between SCSI
devices.

First install your SCSI card, along with XP drivers. Then install ASPI
drivers, which you can get from Adaptec here:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/sc ... /ASPI-4.70

Once the SCSI card is installed and recognized, then you can attach the
scanner and install the scanner drivers and finally the scanner software.

If the SCSI adapter you have doesn't have proper XP drivers available then
you may need to get a new card that does (I recommend Adaptec), but the
cost of a new SCSI adapter (plus the proper cabling) will exceed the cost
of a newer (and much better) scanner that supports USB.

This was always a problem with older SCSI based peripherals, the SCSI
adapters they included were often cards with little if any software
support. This might be a losing battle, and new scanners are better and
cheaper.

Note that even though the package you download from HP indicates both Win98
and WinXP support, the drivers within the package are completely different
for Win98 vs. WinXP. From what I can see the sj167en.exe file is a
self-extracting zip file containing all of the various drivers for the
different OSes. By looking into the zip file (you could rename it from .exe
to .zip), I see three folders containing the various drivers, but I also
see that all of the files are dated 7/20/98, and since XP didn't come out
until late 2001, what you might have in there for XP are NT 4.X drivers
instead. While WinXP is technically NT 5.1, those may be some very *old*
drivers.

RE: the 890c printer, just as with the scanner there is no way a Win98
driver will work with WinXP. Unfortunately if the XP driver supplied by HP
doesn't support double-sided printing then I'm afraid there isn't much you
can do about that other than to get a different printer.

Let me know how everything works out with both the scanner and printer, and
thanks for buying my 17th edition book. I'm working on the 18th right now
in fact, and it should be out sometime in the middle of 2007. Thanks again,
Scott.