Stay away from UMAX

[darrelld]

I wasn't sure where to put this so I put it here.
I own a UMAX scanner (Astra3450). I lost the patch that makes it work with WinXP. So I went to their site, and although they make the patch available for download, if you happen to need the original drivers be prepared to pay! They want $32.00 to send me drivers for my scanner! I'm going to make several back ups of the driver CD so I won't have to bend over for Umax in the future.

If you buy any used Umax product make sure it comes with the drivers!

[Xeroid]

$32=OUCH! I've never heard of anyone charging for drivers before.

[sechs]

The funny thing is that most of the drivers are perfectly downloadable from their European site. This is a North American only thing.

[darrelld]

Thats good to know, I'll check that out. Apparently us decadent Americans can afford to throw money away!

[sechs]

I blame Canada

[rev_ryan]

Originally posted by sechs
I blame Canada

It's probably their fault anyway...

[PresterJohn]

i avoid umax for this very reason. they charge $$$ for w2k/xp drivers that people shouldn't have to pay for!

friend of mine had an old scanner (which was on an win9x box) and which he wanted to hook up to his xp machine. i think umax wanted $15 for the new driver. ridiculous if you ask me.

[Geotpf]

I've never even HEARD of charging for drivers before. That's just insane. I guess they go on my list of companies never to do business with for any reason...

[Tomteriffic]

I gave up on UMAX several squares back. I bought what was supposed to be a super-duper (for its time) scanner that set me back about $350. Then, after tearing my hair out trying to get it to work and suddenly getting a computer that wouldn't boot, I find out that the scanner had a problem dealing with processors that were faster than 300 MHz (350 was fast at the time).

For several months, UMAX woudn't even acknowledge the problem, and a lot of people wound up having to format their HD's and cool stuff like that, since the scanner would render their computers unbootable.

They finally did post a patch, but it was so complicated to implement, especially for someone who wasn't extremely adept at the innards of a computer, that you could wreck your machine again, just trying to put the patch in.

My wife uses it on her Mac these days, no problem, but I stay the heck away from anything UMAX

[wozster]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/25548.html