This scanner was bought and installed by a close associate of mine (I often provide computer support and troubleshooting for them, plus use their Mac myself too at times). The iMac owner initially reported it seemed to work well
for the duties they desired. However, the owner was taken aback by the
small print regarding the main software they bought the scanner for
(Caere OmniPage). Namely, only 25 or so uses of OmniPage is allowed
before it ceases to function, unless the user manages to register the
software somehow. There may have been an online registration process
during the install that the owner skipped (like most everyone does),
because they didn't realize the onerous reg rule existed at the time.
After the install, the owner tried to access the web site to register,
but the site was down and inaccessible. They also tried to do it by
phone, but got one of those automated menu systems which thoroughly
confused them and so they gave up.
In most other matters the owner felt like the scanner was doing OK.
However, the 'Gotchas!' related to the OmniPage limited uses and
registration complexities all by themselves were sufficient to have the
user seriously considering returning the scanner to the store from which
it was bought.

Being an Old Computer Geezer though I noticed some other irksome things
about the scanner and its software the owner hadn't.

For one thing, it doesn't offer the same level of automatic power
management of the PC scanner (a Mustek 600 III EP Plus) we have attached
to a Windows98 laptop. If I'm not mistaken, the Mustek only powers up
when activated by software from the laptop, while the UMAX power light
is on all the time that it's plugged into power. The limited life light
bulb in the UMAX also stays on all the time (even when not in use),
unless the user takes special measures to insure a timer on the unit in
software. But even when the timer is activated, the light still comes on
automatically everytime the iMac is booted up or even restarted(!) All
this should greatly shorten the useful life of the bulb in the UMAX--
which is no small thing in a scanner. UPDATE: The iMac user must
manually turn off the scanner light via several clicks regarding a small
control panel, each and every time the iMac is powered up or restarted--
apparently no automated management system exists or functions for this
purpose. This is highly annoying to the user and wasteful of the
lifespan of the scanner light. END UPDATE.

We also had extra trouble first locating the small control panel toggle
for the light, as instead of appearing as a standalone on the desktop as
the documentation stated, it turned out to be hidden inside Mac OS 8.6's own
control strip, accessible by a tab on the lower left hand corner of the
screen.

But the above wasn't the worst of it by far. No, there was a bug in the
UMAX software that essentially acted like a vampire, continuously sucking
away at the lifeblood of the iMac (processing cycles). Still worse, this
involved disk accesses too. At least once a second you could hear disk
accesses being performed. And this was happening even when you had
nothing to do with the scanner, and you've hadn't opened any
scanner-related software. It also continued even if the scanner was
separately switched off via powerstrip, and/or unplugged from its USB
connection. From the moment you install the scanner software, anytime
your iMac is powered up, the awful vampire sucking noise is present, and
a perceptible slowing of your whole Mac is taking place.

Note folks that aside from the annoyance to the user forced to listen to
this, and the slowing of the Mac across-the-board, there's also possible
risks to your hard disk involved too. For if the power fails during a
disk write, your whole disk could be scrambled. Yes, it's true that your
computer is at risk anytime writing is going on-- but normally this is a
pretty small percentage of the time-- during explicit file saves. In
this scanner case though, it's virtually continuous, or happening
roughly 100% of the time as opposed to maybe 5% or less for file saves.
I couldn't determine if this was actually a disk write or read
going on in regards to the scanner-- but the chances would seem 50/50,
wouldn't they?

But the noise alone, combined with this awareness, is like being forced
NOT to swat one mosquito after another as they stab you and suck your
blood, over and over again. I would not be able to bear this on my
personal machine. Everytime a web page is slow to load, or an app
crashes, or anything else unwanted happens, you can't help but suspect
the mechanism behind that constant vampire sucking sound as the culprit.

I could find nothing in the Read Me or user manual to correct the
problem. And the UMAX web site wouldn't respond.

I went to MacFixIt to find some way to rectify the problem. There I
found a surprisingly long list of documented problems with UMAX
scanners, even including suspected viruses in the software. MacFixIt
also had a name for our particular problem: the UMAX Control Strip
Glitch.

The list of UMAX scanner problems on the site far outpaced my time and
energy for reading through it all. So I just read the first few dozen
items. YIKES!

Our scanner came with Vistascan 3.5. Turns out upgrading to 3.5.1
might solve the vampire sucking sound (it worked for some folks but not
all, according to MacFixIt). There were also references to replacing
Vistascan entirely with MagicScan or Silverfast software to improve the
situation, although it's not clear if Silverfast is available free (it's
from a company other than UMAX, and billed as 'high end' scanner software-- gulp!), and late model versions of MagicScan had the caveat of
officially not supporting this model scanner or Mac.

It also seemed there were possible conflicts with regards to ColorSync
and other things, for which MacFixIt posted various work-arounds to try.


OK, so I decided to try downloading the 3.5.1 upgrade from UMAX.
Surprise, surprise, just like Caere, the UMAX site too was not
responding.

So what could I do in the meantime, while I was waiting to download the
upgrade? Look for other potential sources of problems, of course.

I checked the iMac's Extensions Folder, and lo and behold I found a copy
of ObjectSupportLib that definitely shouldn't have been there.
Apparently an app called EasyPhoto had installed it. I moved OSL from
there and dropped it into the EasyPhoto folder where EP might find it if
it was truly needed. OSL doesn't belong in the System folder of 8.5 and
8.6 Mac OS', and maybe not even in any 8.x OS, if I recall correctly.
There were also two different AppleScript extensions present-- one was
old and outdated according to the 'Get Info' windows, so I moved it out
of there. Two AppleScript icons had been appearing on the iMac desktop
at boot up ever since the owner first installed a few things on it, with
one icon marked out with the angry 'X' Mac OS puts onto stuff that it's
trying to ignore for some reason. I only now had gotten around to fixing
the problem.

There were also two Kodak Precision CP icons showing up at bootup, but
an inspection of the Extensions folder didn't make it clear that the two
were the same file-- they were different sizes and had slightly
different names, for instance. So I left them alone for now (although I
believe I disabled some or all such things on our Mac Performa 6400 last year, after
a year or more of them seeming irrelevant to the typical use of the
Mac).

None of this helped the vampire suck problem of course-- but the actions
didn't seem to hurt the iMac any.

I found a UMAX download site in the United Kingdom and tried downloading
with a standalone Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5-- but got only errors instead. Too, it turned
out the Vistascan upgrade is something like 15-22 MB in size-- YIKES! I
tried initiating downloads several times, with no success. I suspected
the vampire suck was killing the downloads. So to test it, I went to an
old download section of my own web site to do a test download-- and it
worked. So the problem was with the UMAX site, not the iMac or browser.

After several tries I gave up getting anything from the UMAX site, and
recalled that sometimes C|Net's DOWNLOAD.COM offers updates like this. I
checked it out and sure enough it was there (I searched for UMAX and got
a list including the upgrade)! But would the download succeed?

Well, my first try failed after 3 MB had transferred-- maybe due to the
noise on my rural line cutting me off, or a glitch at AOL or on the
source server itself. I tried again, and something like three to five
hours later had successfully gotten the file.

Or at least I hoped I had. I couldn't try running the update until late
the next day, and immediately encountered problems at that point. The
installer threw up an embedded Read Me file that looked like it had lots
of important tips in it, so I tried to save it to disk via the included
button. My reason was that the modal Installer wouldn't allow me to read
the file and run around my desktop performing the recommended tasks at
the same time-- so I needed a SimpleText version that would. Or else had
to take a bunch of painful handwritten notes. Agh! Unfortunately, the Save button only
brought up an undecipherable error dialog.

I didn't have the luxury of a lot of time here. And had already took so
many handwritten notes about problems with all this junk and other
matters in recent days that I just decided to forego the Read Me issues
entirely in this iteration. The owner was just about set to return the
scanner anyway by now, having become disturbed by the incessant vampire
sucking sound themselves too by now.

So I continued past the non-working Read Me save to disk, and tried to
simply install the upgrade. This got me another meaningless error dialog.

I guessed maybe the already present 3.5 version of Vistascan was causing
problems for its also buggy replacement. So, being hellbent for leather
at this point, I went into the iMac's Extensions Manager and set it to
the locked Mac OS 8.6 Base set. This would disable just about every
extra extension the iMac had, including the older Vistascan, to clear
the way for other things. This move could also complicate everything
else that followed too, but heck, I was about ready to literally set
fire to the UMAX software and hardware both. I rebooted so the new
extensions set would take effect.

This time the install seemed to work. I had to reboot the iMac again.

I opened up the Extensions Manager to see what the results were and to
try to put back all the extra extensions the iMac would need for the
other apps too. The EM threw up a dialog saying the current set of
extensions didn't match the setting and did I want it to go back to the
previous set or create a new set that accommodated the changes. I told it
to accommodate. This essentially created a new set that may have been Mac
OS 8.6 Base with the scanner drivers included. I changed this back to
our original set before the Vistascan 3.5.1 install, and made sure the
scanner extensions were still included (checkmarked).

OK folks, after this point I went very, very deep into mucking about
with the inner workings of Mac OS 8.6. I had to, since the 8.6 EM is
more difficult to use than older EMs like those in 7.5.3, and also
doesn't always show you any duplicate extensions that might be present,
etc., as well as seems contradictory on what's enabled and disabled, in
many cases. No, for truly serious problems a Mac expert has to ignore
the 8.6 EM and go straight to the Extensions folder inside the System
folder itself, and try to decipher what belongs and what doesn't from
woefully incomplete information-- I imagine it's something like brain
surgery on a human being, since every brain can be a bit different in
exactly what parts perform what function and the surgeon often is merely
making his best educated guess about where to cut and not cut.

I made no notes during all this, and there were lots of details to be
considered. Basically I looked for duplicate scanner driver related
extensions, and when I found them compared the created/modified dates in
'Get Info'. I'd keep the newest one in the Extensions folder and move
the older one to a junk folder elsewhere on disk NOT inside the System
folder (and NOT trashing the old extension in case I found I'd made a
mistake and needed it again later; never burn bridges in software
matters if you can avoid it). I checked not only the enabled Extensions
folder but the disabled one as well.

Finally I'd done all I could, and restarted.

Would all the various scanner-related elements still work? And would the
constant vampire sucking sound be eliminated? For various unplanned
reasons, plain scanning functionality got a major workout within hours
of the upgrade session. We experienced lots of crashes in the related
PhotoDeluxe software using Vistascan, and so vastly increased PhotoDeluxe's
memory allotment-- which seemed to help some. But still we continued to
experience crashes.

After further work we seemed to narrow down the source of crashes to the
presence of a mounted Iomega ZIP disk in the USB drive, which was
formatted for DOS (the user was creating files for a PC with the
scanner). Ejecting the ZIP disk and only momentarily inserting it to
copy files from the hard drive as needed seemed to bypass the problem
satisfactorily.

The vampire sucking sound? It seems to be gone.

Later on the OmniPage OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software got
tested-- and although the user thinks the process for using it may have
changed in some way, it seems to work (so far). It's possible the
upgrade may have made the changes the user perceived-- it's also
possible the user was mistaken, since they'd not had the chance to use
the set up much since it arrived, and we were all very busy and harried
during the period for various reasons.

At the moment I write this it appears we might be keeping the scanner
now. But it sure did take a lot of work and aggravation to get to this
point.

Worse still, my sister and her husband bought an identical scanner for
their new iMac too, the very same day as ours if I'm not mistaken(!)
Like the set up here did earlier, their system seems to be
working, but possesses the awful vampire sucking sound. In my
sister's case the imminent loss of the OCR package may not be that big a
deal. But at last word the vampire sucking sound was bothering her, and
she was hoping to fix it. Alas, it was difficult enough to do that I'm
unsure if even I personally could correct the identical problem on a
second iMac. Plus, recall that MacFixIt said the upgrade worked on some
Macs and not others....sigh.




Recommended: No