: : I'm there! After doing with my XP system what I did with my old W2K : : system my 2710 is now scanning on my XP system. One last suggestion. scanning huge numbers of slides will drive you utterly insane after the first few days.. so have plenty of alcohol on stanby to dull the pain or if you have a digital camera and can beg/borrow/steal a slide copier and a flat field or macro lens, you'll find the seconds it takes to change slides, wait for the flash to cycle back up and hit the shutter will be a lot less than the time taken for your scanner to do a preview pass I use a bowens illumitrans, set the camera up manually, shoot RAW (to take account of a 1/2 stop either way on the exposures) and can rattle through slides at a rather reasonable rate. Even using a small bellows style slide copier with a flip front and bolting everything down with a small cheap flash and a sheet of translucent white acrylic is well and truly good enough. if you've the capacity to use SD cards or have a CF/SD adapter and can afford to drop $100 on those wireless SD cards i spoke of recently (they're getting GREAT press at the moment!) - you can have the images dumped straight to your hard drive on your computer as you shoot. The results are not up to what I get doing multipass scan using Vuescan and the FS4000US at 4000 dpi, but even with a 6Mp digicam (approx 3000 x 2000 pixels) they're more than good enough for appropriate downsizing and fiddling for screen resolution! Batch cleaned and sharpened through Neatimage, they're certainly good enough with a few level tweeks for an 8x10 too.. just something worth considering if anyone's serious about converting an *entire* slide collection for web images or the like As soon as I can wriggle a nice mask for negatives I'll put all my negs through this process too. I'll probably find importing straight shots of the negs into Vuescan and having it do the conversion with the appropriate film stock mask will probably sort everything out and give me usable positives to play with - he has mask profiles for a lot of films built in and they work nicely with all the scanners I've used. karl
