Thanks everyone. Mikie - I will try that link soon. I sort of agree that if everything's fine, don't go borrowing trouble. But my laptop isn't quite fine - and I don't know what's wrong with it. The past month it's been weird. When I unplug it (to move it to another room), it just shuts down. The battery was staying at 87% all day yesterday - while plugged in. Then it sometimes takes many, many minutes to boot up after it's suddenly shut down because it was unplugged. Sometimes I have to reboot a few times til it functions properly. I updated and ran Avast, superantispyware,malwarebyte and spywareblaster. All were fine - so I don't think I'm infected. I sometimes keep a lot of tabs open at once(I'm embarassed to say how many - but since it's relevant - perhaps 2-3 dozen). I'm comparison shopping and keeping open the tabs for whatever I'm currently researching or shopping for. I know this taxes the resources. When I shut the computer down, I run ccleaner to get all that stuff cleared up. Lately it's done something else weird. Sometimes when I click to open something up in a new tab (Firefox - which was like version 5 - but they recently sprung 9 on my which I never authorized - Windows XP). So I click open a new tab. And the tabs just keep scrolling across the top. As I try to click on a particular tab, the tabs keep scrolling to the left. This happens even if only a dozen tabs are open. And this doesn't happen every time but has become frequent. I have to let it scroll for 5-20 seconds before the tabs stay still - and I can click on one. I have no idea what's going on. At first I thought I had too many tabs open - and overtaxed my system. But since it's happened with closer to 10-12 tabs (and no other programs open), I'm not sure that's the problem. Is it Firefox? My laptop? driver? Thanks. Lynn. PS damccoy - they wouldn't let me print out the page. It kept disappearing - bc. of course they want me to spend money for their program to update - they don't want to hand me the list to do it on my own.

You really have 2 separate issues here. You have the scanning which is relatively easy and the photo repair which is more of a challenge but a whole lot of fun if you can become interested. Defining your "tons of photos etc" and what you want for a finished quality will determine the amount you are willing to pay for your scanner. When I first started a local company wanted $10 for the first scan and $8 for any others done at that time. Figuring that 6 and 4 are 8 and 2 is twelve I realised I could buy a scanner for the price of a dozen scans from the store. A good investment but in those days scanners were not as good as those around now. I have an HP4890 that will individually scan as many photos as I can get on the plate and I can adjust the settings for each scan. Great time saver. I also scan quite large files because you can always reduce the size with no degradation but you cannot successfully increase the size after the scan. The larger the file the better it is when you start photo editing, repairing those damaged shots. Anything above 3 megabytes file size worked well for me. During the scans I never bothered about colour intensity because that got taken care of when I brought them up in Corel PhotoPaint.

Alright, this probably a somewhat older scanner, so I bet it has a Motorola (almost banana)style antenna jack, meaning there only a hole in the back of your scanner, the antenna end has a tip and then a metal shield around it with a few little long springy tabs cut into it. Make sure nothing got into the hole in the back of thescanner, a little piece of foil, or maybe a broken tab from the antenna. Next make sure the outer matel shell with the springy tabs cut into it are not touching the tip. Outside of that, it could be a shorted antenna, as already posted. Or the receiver is history. It's pretty old. I you really like scanning, It may be time for a new scanner. I'm not going to recommend any here, but there are some very nice simple ones there, that have multiple modern antenna connections, PC programming, etc, etc, the sky is the limit. If what I mentioned above does not work, take the scanner to a good radio shop, they are VERY hard to find these days, but search for a HAM Radio store, they usually know their stuff. I'd bet they'd check out your set for free, and point you in the right direction. Sorry so long, but I'm a HAM, and a BIG scanner freak, I LOVE the older stuff and I like to tinker with it, but if you want to hear your stuff, go tslk to them. KEN

We sure did and I was glad to see you response--I had no luck finding the thread. I sent about a dozen negatives to a commercial scanning service and received a CD with very high resolution scans. That was about the time I was hoping to do more myself to save money and got good information from you. My negatives are of varying sizes and quality. I still don't know to what degree a scanner can adjust to denser or thinner negs. Sometimes working with a professional isn't easy. Some of the hand selected negatives were contact printed by student interns is a real darkroom with decent results. I intend to use the best images in an exhibit or two and a PowerPoint presentation to celebrate and educate about a historic district I just got declared elibible for the National Register of Historic Places. I'll take the best legibility I can get and be happy for my goal. During a visit today with the prof, a contributor to my work, I basically heard way too much about the quality of the negatives--too thick, too thin, scratched, poor photographer, improperly stored 60 years ago. As a perfectionist in her craft, she sees these problems and says we can't do much. My approach is if there is a problem, let's solve it. I am at the stage of selling my approach and getting her going. No one had actually scanned anything with the Epson, so I suggested we give it a try since I drove there to see the scans. She put a decent 3x5 neg right on the glass and the Epson produced a great image. I inquired if there needed to be a negative holder and that drew a blank--despite what the reviews of the machine list. So right now I don't know too much except I have faith that if we can get any image it can be manipulated to a reasonable quality. I also found another on-line, reasonable scanning company, and they tell me they can handle about any quality and will send me images on line and I can pick and choose what I want and have to pay for. And the cost to do all my selected images will be less than the dozen I did before. The question here is--do you scan from the glass or always use a negative holder? Have you tried from the glass. I know you talked about one of the photo programs to work on you rscanned images. How much can you enhance a darker or lighter scan? Quite a response for only seeing one scan but I am frustrated by all the negative talk (yup, pun intended) Mike