System: Quantex, Pentium 200, 32 megs RAM, Windows 98, Mustek 600 II EP Pluss plug & play flatbed scanner already installed and working. After the SCSI card for the PhotoSmart Scanner is installed in the computer and the computer is rebooted, the following happens: 1) the display is switched to 640X480X16 colors, 2) this message is displayed, "There is a problem with your display settings. The adapter type is incorrect, or the current settings do not work with your hardware." 3) Then,for Display: (Unknown Monitor) on (Unknown Device) followed by "At this time, display properties settings are limited to trouble shooting changes only. The next time you restart your system the display will be set to 640X480X16 color mode, custom refresh rates will be removed, and any secondary displays will be disabled. After you have restarted successfully, you will be able to change your driver or make other settings changes. Choosing not to continue will retain your original display settings." I chose not to continue and everything seems to return to normal after I reboot.

The question is: What do I do now? I really want the PhotoSmart Scanner installed, but I don't want to screw up everything else in the process.

Thanks in advance for any help. Lynn

-- Lynn Mannan (LynnMannan@aol.com), October 14, 1998

Answers

Hi Lynn, Sorry to hear of your travails! I'm definitely not a PC guru (much more of a Mac person), but hopefully some others will join in with recommendations. The interaction with the display card seems pretty weird - Is the display adapter by any chance an ISA rather than a PCI card? It's possible there's an IRQ conflict between the display adapter and the SCSI adapter. (On my system, where I had so little trouble, the only other ISA card was my sound card, the display adapter was a PCI device.) If you have more than one open ISA slot, it might help to try the SCSI card in a different slot. I wouldn't recommend moving the display card to swap positions with the SCSI card though, unless someone who knows more about PCs is available to straighten things out if the system loses track of the display. Do you have any friends that fall into the "PC geek" category? (I count that as a badge of honor, not a pejorative term!) This would be a good time to call on their expertise. When I trouble-shoot Windows strangeness like this, I'm pretty free with shuffling cards around, etc, but then I have my PC configured with partitions on the hard drive, and use a combination of two deep-geek programs (Partition Magic and Drive Image, both from PowerQuest) to backup and restore the entire hard drive partition I'm playing with if I goof up and do something radically wrong. Someone who knows more about PCs could probably tell you whether it would be safe to tell the system to "continue" when you get to the dialog about the monitor settings... The "PC geek" type I mentioned earlier (or maybe PhotoSmart tech support) could walk you through checking the PC hardware configuration to see if it's recognizing the SCSI card OK. Try this, as a first step to seeing what's going on: *right*-click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop, and select "Properties" - Then, click on the "Device Manager" tab - you should see an entry for "SCSI controller" somewhere in the list if the BIOS is recognizing the card. Next clue: Click to highlight the "Computer" entry in the Device Manager listing, and then click on the "Properties" button at the bottom of the window - You'll get a list of all the hardware in your machine, with an IRQ number next to each one. If there's something else sharing the same IRQ number as the SCSI card, that may be your problem. This information should be helpful to HP tech support in diagnosing the problem. (Or to any hotshot PC types that may read this thread.) Sorry I can't be of more use to you, hope this helps some!

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), October 14, 1998.

I have not personally installed the Photosmart Scanner under Win98, but I did just notice the other day that they had just barely released drivers for it on their website. Could be that the you are using Win95 drivers and Win98 just doesn't like it.

Go to http://www.photosmart.com/products/drivers/drivers.html for the new drivers.

-- Mark Mauerman (markm@elmercado.com), October 22, 1998.

Actually, in our tests of the PhotoSmart Scanner, we were running under Windows 98. It's very possible though, that there are driver conflicts that we didn't experience, but that could be cleared up by the updated drivers. Definitely worth checking out!

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), October 24, 1998.

HP offers free a IRQ-less driver on their website. Just a note, did you disable all tsr's, backgrounds, screensavers, antivirus programs etc. before you installed the HP SCSI card program? To disable tsr's, press ctl+alt+del one time and hilight each program and click end task on all except explorer and systray. good luck HM

-- HW Morehead (mhaid@roman.net), November 25, 1998.

Looks exactly like a resource problem between the video card and the SCSI card. I've seen video cards do this when a new card in the system forces Plug-n-Pray to move their IQR and base addressing. The video card drops to pure 640x480x16 VGA to give the best chance of seeing what's going on with all monitor types.

Look in the Device manager for yellow or red marks on either the video or SCSI icons. If seen, look at the device properties for messages about conflicts. Try to force the SCSI card IRQ to an unused (also non-shared) location, same for base address.

Resource conflicts can be pretty strange in Windows, sometimes it's best to remove all optional cards and build up the system until the problem recurrs. Be patient and methodical... Good luck.

Just to tick off the PC community, my G3 machine's USB port handles all this stuff and the in-built SCSI never conflicts with anything. You do the math.

Glenn Westerfield

-- Glenn Westerfield (glennw@teleport.com), September 27, 1999.