So I have a really nice flatbed scanner. I used to have a CanoScan Lide 400 man moons ago, but switched up to a CanoScan 9000F because it had the ability to scan negatives, I come from a photography background and this feature was a must have for me. I also have a massive back catalog of negatives which at some point need to get digitized, so having this scanner is a must for me.

The only issue I have had is that it's been a while since I last used my flatbed scanner, but in that time I've upgraded a few of my operating systems. On my windows machine I moved from Win10 to Win11 which somehow meant that the software that came with my scanner no longer worked.

As a keen photographer this is pretty frustrating, and the only options I had were to spend a small fortune on 3rd party software or scrap my fully functioning scanner and buying another one. Well neither solution works for me that well, so I made a 3rd option...

It's been a while since I last used VMWare, but it's a lot easier than it used to be and configuration of hardware is great, I cannot rave about it enough. So I set myself up with an older version of Windows and installed all the required drivers and software. This reduced the need for me to buy any new software and it meant I could keep using my older hardware.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is, that I'm using out dated technology in a digital time, I have no interest in stopping some of my analog past times, I will always prefer vinyl to digital, I will always opt for film over an SD Card, so why would I bin a perfectly good scanner because the drivers are out of date.

We throw away far to much rather than make do and repair. Often these challenges are set about to remind us of former skills which we're not using, in my case VMWare for running up a different windows instance, which now I'm thinking about I'm going to spend a few hours setting up some other environments for testing purposes.