Opinion on scanner freezing needed

[deh1217]

Hi,
Running a Compaq Deskpro (P400, 64MB RAM. Windows 95. Using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 for importing scans via HP's precision scan. The scanner is an HP 6200C which includes an Automatic Document Feeder.
All is fine when importing scans from the scanner when the dpi is 150 (color), however when changing to 300 dpi (color) the system freezes. Any ideas on what is happening and how the problem can be resolved. I suspect the RAM needs to be atleast 128MB but am not sure if this is really the reason for the freezin'.
Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
D

[jettlag]

Several Things.

1)Maybe an update to the software

2)With Compaqs' they have alot of software they install with the system. These can usally be alot more harm then good. To check this go to run and type "msconfig". The last tab called startup has ALL your applications running in the background.

For testing purposes remove ALL of them except taskbar and see if the problem is still there.

[tracker]

keep in mind that changing DPI will double the size of the 'data' in your example, so, if this is a scanner hooked to a parallel port, it is going to be painful....if it is USB or SCSI, might want to try to update drivers / bios for scsi card, drivers and firmware for scanner as well.

[Sowulo]

[quote]Originally posted by tracker:
<strong>keep in mind that changing DPI will double the size of the 'data' in your example, so, if this is a scanner hooked to a parallel port, it is going to be painful....if it is USB or SCSI, might want to try to update drivers / bios for scsi card, drivers and firmware for scanner as well.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Actually, if you double the DPI of a scan from 150 to 300, you will quadruple the size of the job. Anything less than 128Mb of RAM in your system can be an endurance contest even without a scan freeze.

[Dante]

Ram is a definate problem. I had 256MB stick and tried to scan in photo quality images at 600dpi. The system didn't freeze, but moved incredibly slow. I added another 256MB stick and Photoshop ran smoothly after that.

Second possibility could be your hard drive space remaining and the size of your swap file. If hard drive space is low, check your Temp directory, Photoshop makes huge temp files.

[IT Len]

I operate a digital imaging company...using dozens of different scanners and software apps..

These guys are all on the money. The single, most important thing to have in your PC [if you're doing a lot of scanning] is as much RAM as your PC and wallet can manage.

We run around two dozen designated scanning PC's, and not one has less than 768MB of RAM.