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Comment by kinleyd | Hacker News Reader

I totally rely on my WinXP vm to run Office legacy stuff, an old scanner for which I only have XP drivers, and to keep alive accounts used by my daughter when she was little. Perhaps I should update it to SP4...

Edit: It was a p2v vm of a desktop I started running in 2005. By 2009/10 it had started to crawl: 5m+ for boot and shutdown compared to seconds as a vm on Linux!

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I've recently started using VueScan for old scanners - it started when we got donated an old 35mm film scanner but it seems to cope with most hardware thrown at it.

Not free, seems very good though. Cross-platform support too: https://www.hamrick.com/

Thanks, I'll certainly try it out.

Edit: Yup, it covers my Visioneer 7300. Thank you indeed.

SANE claimed in 2005 to support the Visioneer 7300, for whatever that's worth. Though VueScan seems very cool, especially supporting IR dist removal, which is not present in SANE (which tends against any processing whatsoever).

I do have sane on my system. However, I found the interface very rudimentary.

Yeah, and the first-party SANE command line frontend (scanimage) is the only one that works reliably for me. I was just thinking of looking in to why none of the third-party frontends are reliable, I think I'll at least post an issue about that on the GitLab. XSane may work better than the GNOME and KDE SANE frontends.

It's great stuff and supports a seemingly endless number of scanners old and new.

What an interesting niche business. Amazing that they have reverse engineered so many different devices (6,000+), though I would bet there are only a few dozen basic categories that you can fit them all in. The founder of Hamrick would make for a very cool AMA type post here.

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