At 3:26 PM -0700 11/3/01, Garth Wood wrote:
At 04:17 PM 03/11/2001 -0500, you wrote:
Hello everyone,
In pondering my scanner options, a new option has occurred to me.
I've got a decent scanner for a beginner (an Acer ScanWit).
Windows won't install it, after many, many attempts and a boatload
of technical advice. Windows crashes on me all the time. So maybe
what I ought to do is get a Mac and use the scanner I've got for
awhile.
I'd like to hear from Mac users, especially on the issues of
support, stability, and ease of use with peripherals such as photo
scanners. I'd also appreciate your best guess as to how hard it
would be for a college educated (albeit in English), long time
Windows user to learn to use a Mac.
While I have no great love for Windoze, in your case (and without
additional information), I'd actually recommend upgrading your O/S
(assuming you're using Win98 or Win98SE or WinME). I've just
installed WinXP Home Edition on one of my LAN computers, and it was
the smoothest install I've ever experienced -- and it recognized
every piece of equipment in the computer or attached thereto and
installed them all flawlessly, with drivers that wereeven newer than
any I had (and I had some pretty unusual stuff, too). All this for
the price of $149.00 CDN for the upgrade. Mind you, the target PC
already came tricked out with lots of memory (>256 MByte RAM). If
you don't have at least 256 MByte RAM, the new O/S may puke a bit.
But these days, RAM's damn near free, and the store I got the
upgrade O/S from was actually *giving away* 128 Megs of RAM with
every sale.
On the other hand, if you want to spend $800 or less and get a recent Mac,
stability is generally pretty good, and even someone whose brain has been
damaged by Windows can figure out how to use one. Photoshop generally runs
better on Macs as well. I do say "recent" because Apple has been moving away
from SCSI (which I bleieve the Scanwit uses) so you might have to suffer
the indignity of paying far less for laster year's model.
paul
--
Paul Wallich pw@xxxxxxxxx
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