kudzu9, thanks for reminding me why I never "upgraded" to Win 10.

Kudzu9, that makes perfect sense. Thank you!

I have almost always hated the upgrades, I thought XP was the best Windows. But when my work network people blocked me, because Microsoft no longer offered security upgrades, I switched. Same thing when going from 7 to 10. But, I got used to the newer OSs. My biggest complaint was when I could no longer run Micrografx Designer on Win 10, so I still have one old Win 7 computer (off line) for running Designer.

Sorry for stealing your thread, I can't actually help your reboot problem; Kudzu9 very likely is right!

Alisande-

Only a guess on my part based on a similar experience. If it keeps recurring frequently, though, please re-post.

My experience is similar to kudzu9's.

I dual boot Windows 10 and Linux. Occasionally I'll boot into Windows and let it do updates. When Windows needs to do a reboot to complete the updates, I have to manually select Windows to boot into, otherwise it will boot into Linux.

So assuming you were running Windows 7 and it decided to reboot to complete an update, it would reboot into Windows 10 if that was first in the boot order.

You might be able to tell by manually booting into Windows 7 to see if it just completed an update.

And of course if you usually run Windows 10 and boot into Windows 7 less often, it would increase the likelihood that when you boot into Windows 7 , it would have an update available.

That said, I suppose I'll take a moment to boot into Windows and see what updates are waiting. :-)

It might be simpler to dedicate one PC with Windows 7 for the scanner software you use and use another PC for internet access and all other things, rather than having both on one. Do you have an old PC you can use?

Sorry--I just saw this. I do have another computer, but no place to set it up with my big scanner. I work at a large desk with the scanner, an even larger photo printer, and a laser printer. Oh, and my ham radio. :-)

I don't see the post that recommended NAPS scanning. Although I haven't quite figured out how NAPS works, I'm guessing it doesn't handle negatives. But thanks to the person who recommended it anyway.

It's the scanner that handles negatives - NAPS just does tells scanner to scan, resolution, crop, rotate, etc. I can do negatives on my Epson V370 Photo Scanner using NAPS - it's worth a try.

https://www.naps2.com/

That makes sense--thanks!

I have an Epson photo scanner (don't remember the model) which does both slides and negatives, but I just use the software supplied by Epson. This ran fine on my old Win7 computer and also runs on my Win10 one. My only complaint is that it's quite slow.

After several attempts I was able to download the Win7 driver for my scanner, and it worked in Win10! I was excited and rather pleased with my efforts. It worked well until today, when I restarted the computer and the driver disappeared. Rather than go through that again, I gave NAPS a try. I wasn't able to successfully scan a slide, but one of my dad's prints from the 1940s turned out pretty well. Thanks for the recommendation!

Alisande, I've had win10 do the same w/HP printer drivers -- newest driver didn't work and went to device mangler and had to "go back" to an older, working (win7) driver that worked. But after a reboot it went back to the newer, bad driver! I think I went to HP's site, downloaded their proprietary universal printer driver and that worked and stays after reboots. There's something in the update menu where you can stop driver "updates", but I've never done that (have you tried "disabling" the bad driver?).

Richard, read somewhere long ago that having linux the default boot instead of windows on a multi-boot setup can cause "issues" during a windows update & subsequent automatic reboot(s). Don't remember the details tho. Because of that, I just put windows as the default boot, and manually select puppy linux when I want to run that.

bengz6westmd-

I try to avoid the “device mangler” as it really messes things up...;-)

I don't think I have a "bad" driver, unless you mean I could try disabling the one that worked before the restart, in which case I could do that. In my research I found posts from lots of people who tried downloading the Win7 driver to use on Win10; some of them reported success, and some did not.