hargrovm

No particular brand - just check the price of the replacement cartridges before you buy - and my own preference would be for a printer with separate color cartidges ie one cartridge for each color - obvious reasons

I've just installed Win2k on a brand new handbuilt machine but cannot get my optic pro 4830p scanner to work correctly. I've downloaded and installed the driver nt driver as suggested on this site and the scanner is found and recognised but when I try and use the scanner - identified as a twain source all I get is a garbled, jumbled up image - horizontal stips of image that appear to be either in the wrong place or badly aligned and the colours look to be in negative - or wrong. I've tried with a number of different scanning programs but the result is the same so I suspect the driverAccording to the compatability list it should work can someone give any suggestions as to what I may have got wrong or things I could try. The lead and everything (apart from the software) is the same as I used to use on a Win98 machine where the scanner works Thanks

I tried all the options under the sun - bios wise The best I found was EPP v1.9 although selecting v1.7 made no difference with IRQ7/378 - but still the scantest program wouldn't recognise the scanner if I told it it was an EPP port it was quite happy to believe however that it was a Standard port SPP so I'm at the stage now that I can scan an image up to 200dpi in colour without any real worries - greyscale I can go all the way to 600dpi - I seem to be able to get to 24bit color 600dpi scans provided that the computer isn't disturbed while it is scanning - if it is then it tends to trash the image or at one stage with one set of bios settings it would crash the machine BSOD-style I checked and according to the WIN 2000 Hardware Manager LPT port is on its own on IRQ 7 and there is nothing untowards with IRQ sharing or resource conflicts - If I'm hooked up to my network then there is no way I can get a clean scanned image over 200dpi. Standalone if I hold my breath I can - but it has an orange tint - which the scanner seems to add when it feels like it - or more correctly removes when it feels like it. The drivers I've tried are from plustek.de - and plustek.com - usa the drivers from the latter aren't any good for me - they work up to 200dpi then you get scrap images using either the 4830p driver or the 4831p driver - Plustek said try both. The 4831p driver from plustek.de is in a broken zip file it seems to me - so i haven't tried that yet. Thanks for your help

I have the same video card - pretty pleased with it under Win200/latest drivers. I don't use the DVI port though as can't afford flat panels. Ok don't quote me on this but the I think the advantage of DVI over Analogue is something like. The Video card starts with a digital representation of the image numbers in memory which it then converts to an analogue signal RGB - which is fine for a CRT monitor - because they're essentially analogue. However the flat panel is essentially digital - LCD's - large numbers of Red Green and Blue Pixels either on or off so the flat panel has to convert the analogue signal back to digital to display it - in all this conversion - the reasoning goes - you'll get some signal degredation so the DVI avoids all this by taking the Digital signal direct from the video card and gives it to the digital processor of the flat panel - avoiding all the analogue conversion in between - I guess giving a better image - Whether you'll see this I don't - but thats my guess at why DVI is better for a flat panel. Hope this helps

A big guess here but from experience I have two SB Live cards working in two NT4 machines workstation/server - they work fine So they ought to work - my guess - Win98 is happy to share IRQ's I've been told/lead to understand that NT4 hates the idea - so I'm guessing that your sound card and another card are sharing an IRQ and I think this is where the ports come in - ports/memory locations??? So the solution might be to try the card in a different PCI slot or use the BIOS to manually allocate IRQ's. I've seen where the AGP socket on an MBoard shares the same IRQ as the PCI slot next to it - you might want to avoid that configuration as a starting point. The old SB AWE cards had configuration settings to persuade them to use different IRQ/memory settings I don't remember seeing those options in the more recent card though so it may be down to where the card is installed. Hope this helps