Win 7 is what Vista was suppose to be and should have been unless they screw it up between now and its public release in Oct. 2009. As I noted before, there are no 64 bit twain drivers and never have been any. So scanners typically could not be used with the 64 bit OSs unless the maker supplied a proprietary driver which would allow the scanner to work with the bundled scanner software but would not permit one to scan from within third party applications like Photoshop as a Twain driver would.
The driver issue with Windows x64 and Vista 64 was and is different from the ASPI layer problem which allowed the OSs to recognized the actual physical device with SCSI based devices. Here the problem was a short feud between Microsoft and Adaptec where Microsoft stopped including the Adaptec ASPI layer (which Adaptec developed and owned) in the Windows OSs. During this brief feud, Microsoft attempted to develop their ow2n version of the ASPI layer; but most SCSI scanners would not recognize it or support it; hence people needed to download from Adaptec the ASPI layer software code and install it in the Windows OSs. Later, the feud ended and Microsoft again supported the Adaptec ASPI layer code. However, by then scanners were dropping the SCSI connection and turning to USB; and Microsoft began developing its own non-twain WMA driver criteria which was introduced in Vista 32 and 64 bit editions, dropping support for 32 bit twain drivers, which will still work in 32 bit Vista but were not included in box with it. Win 7 32 bit and 64 bit will no longer support 32 bit twain drivers or furnish them in box with the OS. Moreover, scanner manufacturers have introduced in their newer models USB based scanners, dropping SCSI, and new WMA drivers (both 32 and 64 bit drivers) for the newly introduced models; but they have not made any attempt to develop said drivers for their older models. Thus unless you are running 32 bit XP or Vista in virtual mode under Win 7 or running a dual boot system, you may not be able to use your old 32 bit twain driver based scanners in the new Microsoft OSs -especially the 64 bit versions. You should be aware, if you are not already, that the upgrade path from XP to Win 7 will (a) require a clean install of Win 7, although there should be many more 64 bit drivers available than there was for X64 or Vista 64, or (b) necessitate a upgrade from X64 to Vista 64 before upgrading from Vista to Win 7. One will not be able to directly upgrade from X64 to Win 7 and have all the settings and registry entries transferred automatically. -----Original Message----- From: filmscanners_ow...@halftone.co.uk [mailto:filmscanners_ow...@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of li...@lazygranch.com Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 5:50 PM To: lau...@advancenet.net Subject: [filmscanners] Re: Epson Perfection V750-M Pro Scanner, X64 is an oddball OS. Really a bastardized version of server2003. I can't wait to get rid of it for Windows 7. X64 predates Vista64, but was supposed to be easily (cough cough) upgraded to Vista. Well, it required a new install and for the longest time the drivers were better under X64 than Vista-64. Then Vista was proclaimed to suck, so I stayed with X64. On usenet, the old X64 users have proclaimed Windows 7 to be the 2nd coming of the messiah of your choice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Unsubscribe by mail to listser...@halftone.co.uk, with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to listser...@halftone.co.uk, with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body