Heads up to Howtek 4500 owners

[Clive Gray]

Guessing this is probably still the best place to post this.

While wondering about ebay I noticed the following

Howtek 4500 Optical Alignment Tool for drum scanner
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/330651757176

Not interested myself as 1; I've brought quite a lot of toys recently and 2; if you are cunning its easy enough to do the alignment without it but I thought it might be of interest to others who own one of these scanners.

[Rod]

Hi Clive,

I saw this ad as well, but having just recently acquired Paul’s Howtek 4500 (Crosfield equivalent actually) I’m not sure I know what it’s for . Would it be useful?

I’m still busy trying to get the scanner operating with my Win XP PC, rather than the Mac it came with. I wasn’t going to bother changing over, but it was becoming increasingly frustrating trying to transfer very large files from the Mac to my PC. They didn’t want to network, the Mac had only a slow USB 1.0 port and would read, but not write to my external drives, so it was either a new external drive or the switchover. Not being a Silverfast enthusiast has also slowed proceedings, but I think I’m nearly there.

However, I think I may have a few queries yet to post in the new “Digital Workflow” section .

Regards,

Rod.

PS This is my second attempt at posting this so I hope there aren't two versions - the first just seemed to disappear half way through writing it . Is this teething troubles with the new forum layout or is it just me?

[Clive Gray]

Hi Rod

It's not essentail but if you ever need to perform the optical alignment procedure it makes life easier. The service manual can be found in the files section of the scan Hi-end group.

I did not like silverfast either and went with Aztek's DPL which I see is at $500 at the moment.

If the dirty Mac is on OSX networking should not be a problem if its on the spawn of Satan AKA OS9 there is a solution to geting it networked.

[Rod]

Hi Clive,

Many thanks for the information. The scanner had just been serviced before I purchased it so I think I'll give this alignment tool a miss.

With regard to networking, the Mac is on OSX version 10.3.9 so I know it should be feasible. However, it's complicated by the fact that I don't have (or don't think I have ) full administrator rights/correct passwords for the Mac - the previous owner didn't either . With a PC this is easy to overcome, but not so with a Mac apparently - unless anyone can advise me otherwise .

As I have a current licence for Silverfast, I'll stay with this at present despite my dislike of its overall user-unfriendliness. Even the Silverfast "Official Guide" that I have mentions that the reader may well be confused by numerous parameters, but still fails to explain them, and the overall layout of the manual is less logical and more randomly ordered than the software itself . Aztek's DPL is, I've heard, far superior, but even at its apparently much-reduced price of $500 I'm not yet tempted.

Regards,

Rod.

PS I guess this should really be in the Digital Workflow section - administrators please move if required.

[Paul Mitchell]

PS I guess this should really be in the Digital Workflow section - administrators please move if required.

Your wish is our command!

[gari]

Rod, I suspect the reason that Mac won't write, just read your HD, is that it is a NTFS formatted drive. if you have a spare you could format it to FAT32, which both machines will read.
A new ext HD would be less than £50 if you don't have a spare. I use a Mac, W7 and Linux machines with a couple of ext HDs that they can all read/write in this format.
Gari

[Rod]

Hi Gari,

Thanks for your information. Yes, I had already discovered that Macs will read but not write to NTFS formatted drives , which is why I decided I would need a new external drive as I couldn't get them to network because of the password problems I mentioned. However, as I already had a SCSI card for my Win XP PC I decided to choose this route instead. Just as well I'm still with XP as Silverfast don't support scanning software for the Howtek for W7.

Being completely new to Macs, I'd still like to know if it's possible to reset all passwords on them - simple on PCs by just removing and replacing the CMOS battery on the motherboard.

Regards,

Rod.

[gari]

Hi Rod, if you go to the Apple website and register with the communities pages under the support tab, you will get a lot of help there.
I know there is a way of getting into the keychain but I don't remember offhand. I know Joanne is a mac user so maybe she can help.

Is the Mac an old G3 iMac? I had one of those way back when, nice machine.
Gari

[Joanna Carter]

Yes Gari, I do know a fair bit about Macs, supporting several customers/friends who have them, not to say the years I spent supporting PC users.

Rod, whereabouts in the country are you?

[Rod]

Gari,
Thanks for the note - the Mac is a G4.

Joanna,
Thanks also. I'm in North Yorks, near Northallerton.

Regards,

Rod.

[Joanna Carter]

Rod, I've sent you a PM

[Clive Gray]

Hi Rod

I'd be tempted just to trash the disk and set it all up again with Tiger as you presumably have the licensing info for Silverfast ? anything else you would need can be found easilly enough.

Mac OSX is just a subset of unix there is always a way to hack the passwords if you have local access, a suitable google will show you the way.

I find Ed Hamricks take on Silverfast amusing myself

http://www.hamrick.com/sil.html

Trident was developed by Colorbyte for the Howteks they had access to hardware level routines allegedly and so does Azteks DPL; silverfast really is quite poor in comparision I found.

The Mac is worth keeping and infecting with OS9 just for the diagnostics software as its faintly possible to get it running on that apparently but just about impossible on a PC.

I'm not a fan of G4's as the fact there are about 5 different versions can bring up so many fun compatabilty issues when you try and do anything with them.

If you do not have a UPS I would strongly suggest investing in one as these scanners are not as well built as many people might like to think and having a UPS on it is a lot cheaper than having nasty things happen with the power supplies as to have any work at all really done on them can some cost a substantail part of the value of one.

[Paul Arthur]

I thought about upgrading the OS, but I don't think the SCSI will work if you do, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Didn't we figure that the password was "password"?

Anyway, have you actually managed to scan anything yet, Rod?

[Rod]

Hi Paul,

Happy New Year and many thanks for the input. No problems at all with the scanner really - just me . I did a test scan when I got it home, which was fine with the Mac.

However, not being able to transfer readily the files over to my PC for processing was an inconvenience, as my existing external hard drive was formatted using NTFS which that version of Mac/OS won't write to and I couldn't get the Mac to network with my PC. I thought that might have been because I didn't have full administrator rights which is where the password issue arose - I know we discussed what the password was, but I didn't log off for fear of losing access altogether. I think the moral of the story is "if it ain't broke don't fix it" .

So, as I already had a SCSI card and wanted to reduce the volume of hardware in my small study, I decided to try running the scanner on my WinXP PC. That was over a month ago and I think it's working OK, but progress was then suddenly interrupted when I severely aggravated an old back injury which has left me pretty much immobile for the last month and culminated in spending Xmas in hospital - just as well it didn't happen when we were carrying the scanner down your stairs .

Fortunately I now seem to be on the mend, so I'll let you know - in the next couple of weeks, I hope - how the scanner's performing under windows.

Regards,

Rod.