Just installed my new scanner (acer usb on pentium class, win98)works good but I look for an easy way to share it over my small home network, the same way I share my printer. Any ideas Thanks Dan

-- Dan Rivet (drivet@dsuper.net), March 10, 2000

Answers

To the best of my knowledge, you can't directly share scanners over a network. The twain driver protocol is not available to the network, and in most circumstances it would be impractical, since you have to physically place a document or whatever into the scanner.

However, there are "remote control" program suites available that let you take over the control of one machine from another. "Remote Desk" is the name of one, and there are about half-a-dozen other such programs. They require a small server or host program to be installed on one machine, and a controller program on another machine. Whether this would allow scanner sharing or not I don't know.

Incidentally there is a "trojan" type virus around called Back-orifice that turns computers into hosts for remote control.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 10, 2000.