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Scanners are useful devices used to input images or text into your computer. Simply place the image or document in the scanner, hit the scanner button, and voila – there’s your image or document on your computer screen just waiting for you to edit it and save it.
If only it were so easy. If all goes well with the installation and your system is running fine, great. However, scanners can run into hardware issues and conflicts with other devices.

Before you determine that it’s a mechanical problem and take it to the nearest repair facility (or recycle it and buy a new one), consider updating the scanner driver. Scanners, like all peripheral hardware devices, require a device driver in order to communicate with the operating system. When something happens to the scanner driver, the scanner and computer can no longer communicate properly.

If you’re wondering how a perfectly functioning scanner can suddenly stop working, it’s fairly simple. Device drivers are programs composed of multiple files just like your other applications. If a file gets deleted or becomes corrupt, the device driver is no longer intact and no longer communicates with the operating system the way it should. Installing new software or devices (or uninstalling applications) can remove or overwrite required device driver files. Spyware and viruses are also known to destroy files including scanner files.

To get your scanner back up and running, you must restore the scanner files. You can do this by using System Restore if you have Windows XP or Vista or you can reinstall the scanner’s original device drivers from CD. Better yet, check to see if you can download the latest device drivers from the scanner’s manufacturer. Having the latest drivers is preferable to reinstalling older ones because you will have the latest hotfixes and patches as well as any performance enhancements of improvements.

You’ll need to go to the scanner’s manufacturer’s website in order to obtain the latest scanner driver. For example, if you have a Canon scanner, go to the Canon website and search for the scanner driver that goes with your device. Make sure to get the scanner driver for the exact model that you own. In addition, pay attention to the operating system that the driver is designed for. If you have Windows XP, don’t download a Windows Vista driver.

If the file that you download is zipped, you will need to unzip it using an unzip utility such as WinZip. Many device drivers come as self-extracting executables which makes updating the driver quite convenient. Simply download the .exe file and follow the prompts as they appear. However, that’s not always the case. You might need to install the scanner driver manually.

Installing the scanner driver involves going into the Control Panel and selecting the Scanner and Cameras icon. For a new installation, click Add Device which will launch the Add Scanner and Camera wizard. Find your manufacturer in the list or click Have Disk. Follow the prompts to install the device.

Installing a new scanner driver isn’t terribly difficult once you know where to look for the latest updated driver and how to do it. Many users mistakenly try to use Device Manager for this task and are surprised to find that scanners are not listed. Like installing a printer, scanners bypass the Device Manager and are installed via their own icon found in the Control Panel.

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