Q. I recently purchased a Gateway 266 MHz Pentium II, 64 megs of RAM, 5.0 gig hard drive, 12x-36x CD-ROM. I am self-employed, an insurance agent with a large company. I am considering going paperless. I know that there are two types of scanners, SCSI and parallel. I was told SCSI is faster than parallel. I will be scanning mostly 8.5 by 10.5 documents, mostly text. Someone mentioned the HP 5100 and said that it will scan a sheet of paper in 10 seconds. The more people I talk to the more answers I get.
Most of the documents will be appraisals, renewal notices, student forms and accident reports. I want to be able to organize the scanned files for easy access and be able to print them.
I want a scanner that will scan documents fast; otherwise, it is pointless to go paperless. Can you provide me with some suggestions?
Margaret Onet @ameritech.net
A. Heaven help him, but Mr. Computer Answer Person has an extreme favorite for scanners at the under $300 level you are describing. The Visioneer PaperPort Strobe isn’t the fastest scanner you will find, but it will meet your 10 seconds-a-page demand with a minimum of fuss on a machine like your Gateway growler.
Best of all, you are spared the task of taking the cover off your PC and installing a SCSI (this stands for Small Computer System Interface and is pronounced scuzzy) card. The 2-inch-high Strobe fits nicely between your keyboard and monitor and connects by way of an enhanced parallel cable between your PC and your printer. It is sheet-fed for speed when handling stacks of documents at a single sitting.
But the main reason I find myself touting PaperPort is its superb software that automatically displays stuff you scan in a very user-friendly desktop setting and allows a huge number of annotation and graphic manipulation features once your pictures and documents are reduced to computerized form.
The software does things like perform optical character recognition and then automatically dumps the data into your word processor or spreadsheet. It also sends scanned documents to your Fax software, thus serving as a full-featured fax machine, or you can send a scanned document to the printer, thus making the scanner into a photocopier.
Even if you choose a competing scanner, you can buy Visioneer PaperPort 5.0 software to get the sort of powers that make having a scanner a real joy.
Q. I’m a new PC owner as of March ’98, learning by trial and error (hopefully not too many errors). My question pertains to updating AOL and Windows 98. Is it advisable to wait until these upgrades have been out for a while and have been road-tested enough to get the kinks out, or does it matter?
Helmut Hunt @aol.com
A. Mr. H, I can’t think of a better question than the one you are raising to make me sound like a shill for Bill Gates. Microsoft, you see, has come up with a credible fix to the so-called Version 1.0 principle, which is, as you say, never to buy the first edition of a new product because it will have bugs that still need swatting.
A major new Windows 98 feature allows a user connected to the Internet to simply click a Windows Update icon and automatically download any needed patches, fixes, revisions or other tweaks Microsoft is making in its operating system.
The idea is to make Windows a self-healing operating system that can always reach out to the Web for the kind of fixes that used to require burning new CDs or floppy disks, putting them in an upgrade box and shipping them to stores.
As for America Online, this company has a long tradition of fixing and updating the software by means of customer downloads.
Q. I know you once gave out information on how to get rid of all those America Online directories that show up when files are listed. I think they’re things like aol30, aol30a, aol30c, etc. Can you tell me how to find out which ones I can get rid of?
Al Greene @aol.com
A. Every time you upgrade America Online software the installation program puts the new software into a new directory and tags the next letter of the alphabet to the end. Thus aol30a gets followed by aol30b, etc. The upgrade software is then supposed to add an icon for the new version on your desktop.
Oftentimes the system falls down, however, and people who think they are using the latest software they installed actually are using icons that point to earlier versions.
So you need to find the icon you use to run AOL and then click it with the right mouse button to call up a menu. Choose Properties and check to see which AOL version you are using. This is the only one that will have your current address book, favorites, e-mail archives etc.
Then drag the other aol versions to the trash. If you find a version that looks more recent than the one your icon points too you should reinstall the latest AOL software you have after removing the other folders. This will write yet another AOL directory but one with your personal settings. Make sure your AOL icon points to the brand new install and you’ll be back in business.
———-
Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611. If you think you’ve got a better answer to any of these questions, add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/go/askjim.
