as said, not many scanners seem to work fine together.
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Attaching two USB scanners to a PC
I have an Epson Perfection 4490 flatbed scanner and a Xerox DocuMate 152 sheetfeed scanner attached to my Win XP Pro (fully updated) PC -- plenty of processor power and RAM. Since I got the Xerox, I've had problems switching between the two scanners; the Epson doesn't seem to want to work most of the time if I've selected the Xerox in an application and then, the next time, want to select the Epson. For example, it hangs in Acrobat (not Reader) with a message to the effect that the scanner might be locked and that I should turn it off and turn it on again. That doesn''t work at all.
The Epson is plugged directly to the PC. The Xerox is plugged into a USB hub.
I wrote to Epson Tech support. They suggested reinstalling the driver; made sense. But, it did absolutely no good. When I wrote back to tell them about that (and I've also told them the brand, etc, of the other scanner), this is the response I got:
>>>>Thank you for contacting the Epson Connection.
You may not be able to install multiple Universal Serial Bus (USB) scanners in Windows XP and use them simultaneously. For example, when you attach two scanners to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports of your Windows XP-based computer, the first scanner that you connect is detected correctly; however, when you connect the second scanner, you may experience one of the following symptoms:
A) The second scanner is listed in Device Manager as "Unknown Device".
B) You receive the following error message (it is displayed next to the scanner in Device Manager):
Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because a previous instance of the device driver is still in memory. (Code 38)
This occurs because the Usbscan.sys driver cannot be used simultaneously by more than one scanner. To work around this, connect and use one scanner at a time. To use the second scanner, disconnect the first scanner from the USB port, restart the computer, and then connect the second scanner. To use the first scanner, disconnect the second scanner from the USB port, restart the computer, and then connect the first scanner.<<<<<<<<<<
I don't have any error messages or "Unknown Devices" in Device Manager. And, it's hard to believe that Win XP can't handle two scanners. Any advice?
Thanks.
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by: wyliecoyoteukPosted on 2007-01-24 at 16:08:09ID: 18391857
Well, windows XP USB handling is pretty poor, it does not track devices well.
For example, if you unplug a device and plug it in to another port, you usually need to reinstall it.
(In contrast, my Linux boxes just note that the same device is using a different port).
Also, some windows USB scanners are GDI devices, which means that windows does a lot of the processing work for them, which makes them cheaper, but stops them sharing resources.
Epson and HP scanners seem the most prone to resource sharing based failure.