Does anyone have a 120 VAC to 12VDC @ 1.2A power supply laying around?
Recently I discovered my scanner had died. Its a fairly serviceable HP ScanJet 3300C and while not inspiring me in any particular way has done what scanners are supposed to do for something like 5 years now. With what little technical knowledge I have in this area I have determined that actually the scanner is probably fine, its the power supply that's dead.
This shouldn't surprise me I guess. There's a lot of heat for a consumer component there, its been on constantly for longer than I can really remember, and HP has so much confidence in it that they won't even print their logo on the thing.
So, off to Radio Shack we go; as this is one of the few things that that particular store is still pretty good at. Not this time though. They have something close to what I want 12VDC @ 1.0A or 1.5A - no 1.2A, and the 1.5A is out of stock. So much for the easy solution.
But here's the real rub. Even if they did have exactly what I was looking for, it would likely cost North of $25. The whole scanner was only $80 when I bought the thing. Is it really worth the $25 to get this one going again? I think I may have fallen into a little bit of a planned obsolescence trap here. As a five year old piece of hardware the drivers are not supported by XP, its USB 1, and the resolution is sort of low. If I bought a new one I would get higher resolution, USB 2 or Firewire, and XP drivers.
Does anyone think there might be a person in an office at HP thinking I am supposed to come to this conclusion?
There must be an old adaptor somewhere in the house that will moot this train of thought.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Scanner quandary
Posted by David at 7:33 PM
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