Ooops! I copied John and David but forgot to put the list on copy in
case others out there are having strange problems with their Acer
Scanwits. Also, in answer to whomever suggested setting the IRQ jumper
on the SCSI card, fortunately, the ACARD SCSI adapter is a PCI card and
does not have nor require an IRQ jumper.
John said:
I've tried the suggestions that came in, and nothing worked. So I
opened the computer again and changed the card to another slot. It's
seated and screwed down. Put everything back together, turned on
scanner, turned on computer. At this point, the directions say that I'm
supposed to get a
message saying "New hardware found." I do not get this message. Any
ideas, anyone?
Then David asked:
i) which OS are you using?
ii) have you made sure that the scanner is terminated?
-----------------------------------------------------
David's question about termination is a fair question for a SCSI
device. Be advised, however, that the Acer Scanwit is self-terminated
and does not come with nor need a termination block. If you call Acer
tech support on this question you may or may not get the right answer.
Just believe that a terminator is not needed so that you can move on to
other issues.
Your problem appears to have nothing to do with the scanner itself. The
problem is that the system has yet to recognize the installation of the
SCSI card. So, David's first question: Which OS? is very important.
If it's Windows 95 then you should immediately head out to find an
upgrade to Windows 98 or ME or Windows 2000 Professional. The
recognition
of the SCSI card is dependent on the Windows Plug and Play interface and
is unlikely to work properly in Windows 95. (for that matter, Windows 95
is unlikely to work properly in many other respects as well).
If you are already running one of these later Windows systems and the
SCSI card is still not recognized then start to be suspicious of the low
level drivers for your motherboard. I have installed my Scanwit on two
different Win98 systems and my (current) Win2000 system. The last two
installs were troublefree but the first took months to resolve. The
problem ultimately turned out to be a bug in the PCI IRQ steering logic
in the drivers for same supplied by EPOX for my (then) EPOX MVP3E
motherboard.
Unlike the ISA bus, the PCI bus is capable of doing interrupt sharing.
The interrupt sharing is handled by the IRQ steering logic. Initially,
I never suspected anything wrong about the mother board because it had
been successfully running for about 18 months. What I didn't realize
was that, until the installation of the SCSI card there were enough
IRQ's available for each device to have its own IRQ and sharing was not
required. Installing the SCSI card put the system over the edge and,
for the first time, called the faulty IRQ steering logic into play. In
a nutshell, the SCSI card was never properly recognized. If you go to
"settings" and then find the "device manager" it will probably show a
yellow exclamation point next to "SCSI controllers". If that's the case
you'll never get the scanner to work until you get the SCSI card
recognized and running. So, find out who makes your motherboard and
check their website for the existence of any patched low level Windows
drivers. Install these patches even if their tech support can't imagine
how the patches they have will fix your problem. EPOX tech support told
me that there were no patches on their website that could possibly have
any bearing on my SCSI problem. I went looking anyhow and noticed the
IRQ steering bug. Installed that and a couple of other (probably
unrelated) patches and saw the system boot and instantly solve the SCSI
problem... after two months of tearing out my hair.
(note to Adaptec lovers: The Acer Scanwit is supplied with an ACARD
SCSI adapter and driver which works just fine. It does not need an
Adaptec SCSI adapter to work. In fact, the ACARD has a handy little
utility for bringing the scanner on line in the event the scanner wasn't
powered up when the system booted. Something Adaptec doesn't have).
One final note: If you decide to run Win2000 you may have to go to the
Acer website in Taiwan to get the drivers. When I installed them many
months ago they were not available from Acer's US website.
Hope this helps. Message me off-list if you have more questions.
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
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