On 16 Jan 00, at 8:01, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Windows 95/98 is designed for the consumer or home user market. It is
> sold by the tens of millions. Windows NT is sold for the business
> market in dramatically smaller volumes. While we can all have a laugh
> over whether NT is really reliable and secure it IS much more reliable
> and secure than Windows 95/98. The reason for this is that it has a
> totally different internal architecture including a totally different
> device driver architecture. (device drivers are specialized software
> that communicate with and control hardware devices such as disks,
> printers and yes, ES-10's)
Actually, when it comes to scanners, NT is not all that different from win9x,
as it uses essentially the same Twain driver interface. (one of the big
weaknesses in scanner support, imho). I have yet to find a SCSI scanner
which does not work in NT (including about 10 different models from Epson,
HP, UMAX, Acer, Microtek), since the Twain drivers are usually the same
ones used in win9x. In many cases, the SCSI card drivers are also common
between win9x and NT. So it does seem odd to me that the ES-10S does
not work in NT. Is the problem with the SCSI card drivers, or the scanner
Twain driver? If the SCSI, has anyone tried a different SCSI card?
> Now look at the ES-10. It is also a consumer or home user device and a
> fairly specialized one at that... which means it will be sold in
> relatively small numbers. But how many home users are running Windows
> NT? Not very many. I would hazard a guess that it doesn't exceed 1
> percent. The ES-10 would need a different device driver to run under
> NT. It would cost just as much to develop this driver as one for
> Windows 95/98 but you could only ever sell a very small number of them.
> Simply put, the development cost can't be justified against the
> potential sales.
As mentioned above, this is not necessarily the case. And I have not seen a
current model SCSI (and even most parallel port) scanner which does *not*
support NT, even the $99 models.
> So, the lesson is, if you want to use low cost, consumer devices on your
> computer, you are going to have to accept the consumer operating
> system. Anything else is not cost justified on the part of the
> manufacturer. There is absolutely no reason for anger at Olympus. Had
> they promised support for NT and then failed to deliver then, yes, feel
> angry. However, I doubt that they ever promised such support nor even
> implied that it might be developed. Those who feel betrayed should have
> asked the software support question before buying, not after.
Yes, this is a good point, which makes me wonder about my impending
purchase of a C-2000 camera, which will be used in an NT environment. But
just because a manufacturer says NT on the box, don't assume it will work! I
give the following 3 cases as examples of products carrying the NT logo
which do not work with NT in a real environment:
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 10
Microtek Scanmaker X6EL
Xerox WorkCentre 385 LaserFax/Printer
In all three cases, the above work ONLY if the user is logged in with FULL
administrative access, and calls to tech support confirm this, and also
confirm that they will not fix this design fault. Anyone familiar with NT will
know this is not a realistic situation for a corporate NT network, and it
certainly does NOT comply with Microsoft's Windows NT certification
guidelines.
> There may be many reasons why it is preferable for you to run NT at home
> but, as we've discovered here, there are also reasons not to. If you
> are running NT at home then perhaps you should consider a dual boot
> system to support such things as ES-10's.
I ran a dual boot system at first, in order to support an old parallel port
Epson
scanner without NT drivers. The problem was, win9x did support the scanner,
but it was too bloody unstable to allow me to scan an image, manipulate it in
Photoshop, and save it without crashing several times a night! I removed
win9x from my system shortly after that incident, as I had no other use for it.
For comparison, the same system is still running the original installation of
NT Server 4.0 done in 97, and has had ZERO crashes in the 2.5 years since,
used daily as a workstation at home.
Life is too short to put up with the instability of win9x, so I run NT. Even my
daughter's Reader Rabbit games run better on NT! And there is no shortage
of products on the market to choose from, so if one does not support NT, I
don't even consider it anymore. It is disappointing to think any current
Olympus product may fall in this category.
Shawn & Janis Wright
swright@xxxxxxxxx
http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/~swright
(Olympus List Archives)
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|