Win Fax/Scan Can't See Scanner

The scanner shows up nicely in devices and printers but Windows Fax and Scan says it can't find a scanner.

But: Windows did see the scanner when I first connected it and went looking for drivers.

Which it didn't find.

So I found them and installed them.

And now the scanner shows up, as I said, in Devices and Printers.

Windows sees the physical thing - i.e. that connection is okay.
Windows sees the drivers - so that's okay.
But Windows prog doesn't see it...

Any clues?

Some other prog I could download that'd quickly take a look for a scanner?

Not much help to you but most of my experiences with printers, scanners and Windows have been infuriating. (Even more so if HP is involved.)

In your case, since you say the device appeared initially, I suggest a do-over. But first uninstall every reference to the device you can find. Run CCleaner through the registry before reinstalling. Check windows update for whatever it offers before using a manufacturers driver. The biggest impediment to getting printers to run (in my experience) is the presence of other driver instances.

I see I didn't state what kind of scanner, did I? Pretty remiss. It is an old Canon Canoscan Lide something or other. Lide20, I think.

Pretty old but the driver is pretty new. Canon still have an interest. Driver said to be suited for Win7. So perhaps if I get back to Canon they may have some ideas.

I'll put it on another machine first, see if I can get it working there in order to rule out the possibility of it somehow being the scanner that is at fault.

If Canon has a Win7 driver for it, it should work. Uninstall it and any Canon drivers, and try reinstalling.

I have a great old HP legal flatbed scanner that is the equal of any recent hardware but its drivers were never updated beyond XP. After running in in Virtual XP for a few years, I have finally given up...

RogerR
I have an old Scanjet 5p and it runs fine with an Adaptec PCI to SCSI card. it is a 2904 card
The driver will change the card to "Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Controller (Emulated)"
After that you will need some scanning software that supports the scanner. I use VueScan. it is free to try.
if you need my driver for the SCSI card, I can upload it here.
Sven

I would be inclined to run an old XP machine alongside whatever current machine I've got.

We have Unix, XP, Win7 and Win10 running at home here now - all for various reasons the weakest reason of all being the Win10 which was just curiosity about what's the latest plus taking advantage of the free update.

And just this week I had to rebuild a machine and I put Win7 on it and doing that brought this activation thing to mind again. I'm sick of it. I think I'll move to an open source Unix and be done with it. :)