Not a fuse. A dohicky (sorry for the technical name - lol) that, I believe, helps prevent interference with signals.

Oh, grandms, I thank you. I am having a good time putting together pictures of folks who have passed on and I miss.I feel this is the year I honor them on Pinterest of all places. Un huh. One of my boards is for them. It's that sort of thing. I need to connect and ressurect them. Hope you know what Pinterest is. Oh, that CC. I hope I am in good shape. Life goes on with a little helo from my friends ps: I rmember in the late 1970s and the company I worked for had a new OCR machine. That thing was a disaster and yet state of the art. Numbers where there were supposed to be letters and really no help at all. Now I have a scanner for $9 and change if you read above. Guess that was 32 years ago at least. Seems like yesterday. Ha ha. Thanks again for you good wishes.

Followed this post with interest since I have wanted one of these scanners ever since I found out about them. On Jan 2, I purchased the one from HSN that scans both JPEG and PDF, after some research that model is only available at HSN. Anyway, I am pretty pleased with it. I scanned loose paper, page out of a book, a pattern (I sew), a page out of a magazine, and a photo. The scans to PDF are better than my old flat bed and much quicker. I have only done a couple of pictures and was not that happy with it, but my main focus was to scan my files and get rid of paper clutter. I think it will be perfect for that. There is a slight learning curve, for example start at the top not bottom of your page or the scan will be upside down. With a bit of practice, I was able to drag it at the proper speed and without movement to get a perfect scan. You can still read it but it has "waves" in it if you hesitate or wiggle the wand. Super easy to transfer to computer. No software involved. Just hook up with USB and it acts as a flash drive, review what you scanned, cut and paste to where you want it on your hard drive. Now if the product doesn't break down, I will be happy with my purchase. Hope this helps you if you are thinking about getting one of these scanners. Murphy

Be very careful about committing your only copies of financial records to digital. Someone above suggested copying onto rewritable CDs (CD-RW) to allow you to add to what's on there. Be aware that CD-RWs typically have significantly shorter lifespans than "write-once" CDs (CD-Rs). You could run into trouble a few years down the line when you try to retrieve some info and find out that the disc is corrupted and what you want is not retrievable. Burnable CDs also are a textbook example of getting what you pay for. The spindle of 100 CDs that is "free after rebate" at your local electronics superstore typically is of very low quality, and I would not depend on them to keep anything beyond 6-12 months. They may make it that long. But I sure wouldn't put all two copies of important documents on such low-quality discs. Finally, there is the file format of the disc and files themselves. The scrapheap of history is littered with storage technologies that were made obsolete by size, low capacity, or bankruptcy. While Microsoft's dominance now seems to ensure some longevity, at one time Microsoft was the David in the corner to other companies' Goliaths. What it comes down to is that scanning important documents may save you some paper, but it is not "set it and forget it". It will cause you additional work in transferring those files to new formats/applications/operating systems as years go by. If this is not something that interests you or seems like too much work for an activity that's supposed to save you effort, then you might just want to stuff file folders into a cabinet. I'm as big a computer geek as they come -- and that's what I do. Paper: simple, reasonably permanent, and eminently transportable.