Old scanner won't work under Win2K

I have an HP Scanjet 5100C scanner, which I got when I bought my computer, about six years ago - it came with Windows 95 factory-installed. Over the years, I've upgraded many things on my machine, and most recently I formatted my C: drive and did a clean install of Windows 2000 Professional on it. But now I'm running into problems getting my scanner to work.

First I went to HP's website, and found a Win2K driver update. When I tried to install it, it told me I had to reinstall the scanner software first. When I tried to reinstall the scanner software, the install failed. And when I rebooted my computer, I got a BSOD!

I futzed with everything I could think of, but just kept getting the same results. Finally I geve up and phoned HP tech support. To begin with, they told me that the 5100C is "out of warranty ", and therefore there would be a charge for the call. However, their billing system was down (!), so they gave me a "one-time no-charge call ".

I described the entire problem in great detail; the technician put me on hold for about ten minutes while he "looked up solutions ". When he came back, he told me basically that it wasn't possible to do what I wanted to do. The driver updates only work if there are older drivers present to begin with. The software CD that came with the scanner attempts to install drivers, but there are no Win2K drivers on it, since it came out before Win2K was invented. I can't use the driver upgrade without reinstalling the software, and I can't reinstall the software without drivers! And HP does not have standalone Win2K drivers for the 5100C! (The only way it would have worked is if I had upgraded my system from Win95 to Win2K, instead of doing a clean install; then there would have been old drivers still present to update.)

Apparently my choices are either to reinstall Win95, or buy a new scanner. I can't believe there isn't some other way. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

I know your dilemma. I have been up against similar Catch 22 situations, myself. Frankly, I have no solution on the 5100C other than what has been already suggested by HP; however, I do have some additional information that may or may not interest you.

I don't know what part of the world you are in; but, there is a Sam's Club in my area that is selling a Visioneer Paperport scanner for $59. I got one for my father-in-law recently and for $59 or even a hundred dollars, I haven't seen any scanner that meets my needs or his needs with more ease.

I liked it so much, I bought one for the only one of my sons who doesn't have one. His broke several months back.

Personally, I have an HP 6200C and it is okay, I guess; but, if it weren't for the ocassional and indespensible need for an ISIS driver (available for very few scanners from a third party), I would get rid of this 6200C and get one of those $59 jobs.

 

I kept tinkering with my 1994 Canon IX4015 until I got it working, I'm sure there's a way to get yours going too. Mainly, it was the software that needed work - have you tried setting compatibilty to Win'95?

Russ

 

Alex, I'm in New Jersey, but there's no Sam's Club anywhere around here. There is a Costco, and I'm a member, but I just took a quick look at their webpage, and the cheapest scanner they've got is $109, and it requires USB. This machine does not have USB. In fact, I installed a second parallel port just for the scanner, because it never would daisy-chain correctly with the printer. My serial ports are taken up by the digital camera and the hot-synch cradle for my PalmPilot, so whatever scanner I get has to work through a parallel port.

RASelkirk, I'm not sure what you mean by "setting the compatibilities ". I can't get the HP software to install to a point where I can set anything on it. Also, the HP tech told me that there were no drivers for this scanner, only driver "updates ". But if there are any software workarounds for this, I'd be very grateful to know about them.

 

The scanner I am describing is a USB.

 

As I described, USB devices are useless to me. Can you recommend any non-USB scanners that are Win2K compatible?

 

May I suggest getting a combination card. One with say USB and Parallel ports. They do exist with many combinations also.
Use Google and look for them is my suggestion.

 

After some intense Googling, I found instructions on how to install the HP Scanjet software in Win2K. I downloaded the suggested files, and carefully unzipped them into the appropriate folders. I followed all the instructions. The instructions said that, after rebooting my computer, it would ask for a particular set of drivers. It never asked. I uninstalled, deleted, and retried. Several times. Still didn't work. I'm beginning to think maybe the HP support guy was right, and you can't use this scanner under Win2K.

 

Did the disk that came with it have NT drivers? If so you might give them a try. I've got an old visioneer scanner that there is no driver for xp for. Supposedly not supposed to work on xp any which way. I downloaded drivers for NT for the heck of it, installed them and it's been running fine ever since. Perhaps it would work for you.

 

Nope, no NT drivers. Which is a shame, because your idea sounds promising - after all, Win2K Pro is basically "NT 5.0 ". This scanner is just too old, I think, even though it can do its job perfectly fine.

Now I've just got to figure out why every single scanner I've looked at is USB, not parallel (or any other type of connection).

 

http://store.yahoo.com/buyaib/mulhiscerusb.html

I have used about eight of these with no problems.

 

Looks intriguing, Alex. But I don't know anything at all about USB. As I mentioned above, this computer came with Win95 on it, sometime in the last millennium. Win95 claimed to be capable of USB support, but any attempt to install that feature and use it led to disaster. Anyway, the machine doesn't have anything resembling a USB port at the moment. It does have a second parallel port, because the scanner wouldn't play nice with the printer. Should I remove the second parallel-port card, and install the USB port card instead? Will I have to add any software components to Win2K Pro to enable it to handle USB?

Thanks for the info.

 

There are NT 4.0 software and drivers for the 5100c listed HERE

The first link will take you to a page to order the software on CD-Rom.. The fifth link is to download the same software: ScanJet 5100C/Cse/Cxi PrecisionScan Scanning Software(English) 17.26 MB

EDIT:

The first and fifth links mention scanning software only.

The second link lists:
CD - Scanjet 5100Cse Office By Design software/driver so, I'm not sure which, if any of these might help you.

 

Check this out. HP specs say 2k compatable


Edit the link to this

http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=157641#

 

The last edition of Windows 95 claimed to have USB support and I have seen several machines in which a USB card was added and it worked. However, my personal experience is almost zero on Win95-USB and I'm sure there are others here who can do more in the department of first-hand experience with it.

Provided your old printer port card is PCI, yes, you would simply remove it, insert the USB card and then load its drivers.

Frankly, I would upgrade that machine to Win98 provided I had at least 64 megs of RAM. That would solve the Win95-USB support problem in a flash.

 

Also, an advantage of going with a USB card and USB scanner is that it gives you future compatibility with newer things.

 

If you are thinking about adding USB ports, look here:

http://www.usbman.com/Guides/Upgrade Card Manufacturers.htm

By the way, I bought my Win95B machine in January 1998 and it came with two working usb ports. The USB Supplement for OSR2 was already installed - version 1214, not the older 1212 version - and USB was already enabled in the bios.

 

Ace, I found the following with a groups.google search on HP 5100C scanner Win2000 driver CD so it seems that the Precision Scan software for NT4 , sj263en.exe (17.26 MB) from http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/softwa...ftitem=sj263en&prodId=c5192a&lc=en&sw_lang=en
(or order the CD) might work after all:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...elm=8dqegi%2439s%241%40nnrp1.deja.com&rnum=13
==========copy/paste===========
From: Ronn
Subject: Re: HP S**KS! no scanner or Xd writer support for WIN 2000
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.win2000.hardware
Date: 2000/04/19

I found out today that if you download the Scanjet software for NT4 for an
HP 5100C scanner (snip)
(sj263en.exe 17.26 Megabytes), install it, and then make the one small step
of removing " HP Parallel Port Test" from the STARTUP folder all the
features that you had previously under win 98 ( and a few more) are
available again, the HP precision scan software works flawlessly with the
drivers that were on the Win 2000 disk.
To say I was ecstatic wasn't the word!!!!
=============end c/p

 

Alice, I tried the NT drivers, with the same results as before... the install failed, creating weird problems until I deleted the files and hand-edited the Registry to remove everything relating to HP. I think this is because, when I installed Win2K, I formatted my C: drive and did a new, clean install (rather than overlaying it on top of Win95 - which I tried, but it didn't work).

Windows 95B claimed it was capable of USB support, and there was a patch on the Win95B CD that was supposed to install it. I don't remember the exact details, because this happened a long time ago, but when I installed the USB support, it conflicted with something else (might have been the DUN patch), and destroyed Win95 to the point where I had to reinstall it twice to get everything working again. Anyway, I'm beginning to like Win2K Pro ;-)

Beanman2k, at this point I wouldn't take another HP scanner if someone gave it to me for free! What I think I'm going to do is get a USB card and a less-than-$100 scanner. (Hmmm... then I can use USB instead of the serial port to download images from my digital camera, which ought to make the transfer faster...)

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions!

 

Go to newegg.com, good prices many with free shipping. Good luck to you. I'm still using my old Umax Astra 600s, even works in Linux.