0Getting old scanners working with Windows 10 64bit

Many years back I wrote an art­icle about how to get old scan­ners work­ing with Win­dows 7 x64. I recently upgraded the PC con­nec­ted to the scan­ners to Win­dows 10 and was faced with the same chal­lenge all over again. Amaz­ingly the same tricks worked and both scan­ners are now work­ing! Below I detail pre­cisely how to achieve this.

The 2 scan­ners in ques­tion in my case are a Nikon slide scan­ner (CoolS­can IV ED) and a Can­on Lide 50 flat­bed scan­ner. There is a mod­i­fied driver for the Can­on which worked with win­dows 7 and the same driver can be installed on win­dows 10 via the “have disk” meth­od in device man­ager, as long as device driv­ing sign­ing is tem­por­ar­ily dis­abled first. See below for pre­cise step by step instructions.

The Nikon scan­ner does­n’t have a modi­fi­able driver but I was able to get it work­ing with an old ver­sion of Ham­rick Vues­can which installs a driver which works with the Nikon scan­ning soft­ware. New­er ver­sions of Vues­can (when paid for) will work, but Vues­can has it’s own app which does­n’t work well for scan­ning slides, so I wanted to use the Nikon soft­ware dir­ectly. The older vues­can driver works with this but like the mod­i­fied Can­on driver, device driver sign­ing veri­fic­a­tion needs to be dis­abled tem­por­ar­ily to install it.

Disable device driver signing

• Click on start and select settings
• Select “update and security”
• Scroll down to recovery
• Under “advanced star­tup” select “restart”
• In the new inter­face that appears select “troubleshoot”
• Select “advanced options”
• Select “star­tup settings”
• Click restart
• When the PC restarts select the option to dis­able device driver sign­ing enforce­ment (option 7)

Install the canon driver via device manager

• Down­load the cus­tom­ised driver cour­tesy of web­whitenoise or from our down­loads page, and extract it.
• Right click on “this pc” and select properties
• select “device man­ager” at top top left
• Expand either “ima­ging devices” or “unknown devices” to loc­ate the scanner
• Double click to open the device and then in the new win­dow that opens click on the “driver” tab
• Click “update driver”
• Select “browse my com­puter for drivers”
• Select “Let me pick from a list of avail­able drivers on my computer”
• Click “have disk”
• Browse to the loc­a­tion where the driver is located
• Select the only device that appears in the list and click next
• There will be a couple of warn­ings that you need to con­firm you want to go ahead

Install the canon scan software

• Down­load Can­on­Scan Tool­box from Can­on or from our down­loads page
• Extract the files and install the soft­ware. You may need to enable com­pat­ib­il­ity mode
• You should then be able to scan via TWAIN in any applic­a­tion that sup­ports it

Obtain the older VueScan driver

• I found and used a ver­sion of vues­can with the file­name vuex6490.exe with a digit­al sig­na­ture date of “‎15 ‎Octo­ber ‎2011 13:41:21”. Vues­can provide old cop­ies so this can be down­loaded directly
• Install the soft­ware and let it install the drivers for the scanner.
• You then need to loc­ate and make a copy of these 10 files which should be loc­ated inb C:\VueScan: dpinst32.exe (550,720); dpinst64.exe (676,160); scanners.inf (103,521); vueps32.8ba (73,216); vueps64.8ba (85,504); vuescan.exe (10,599,752); vuescan.ini (105); vuescan.log (29,292); vuetw32.ds (189,952); vuetw64.ds (229,888). The easi­est way to do this is to copy the VueS­can folder to anoth­er loc­a­tion (e.g your desktop or down­loads folder)
• You should now unin­stall vues­can from “pro­grams and fea­tures” (in con­trol pan­el) as we only want the driver not the vues­can soft­ware itself.

Install the vuescan driver via device manager

• Use the same pro­cess as out­lined above for the can­on drivers but point to the extrac­ted vues­can driver that you copied

Install the nikon scan software

• Down­load the soft­ware installer ns403en_vista.exe from Nikon (e.g. from Nikon Aus­tralia)
• Extract the files and install the soft­ware. You may need to enable com­pat­ib­il­ity mode
• The Nikon soft­ware will recog­nise the VueS­can driver and will enable scan­ning. You will need to put a slide into the scan­ner for the scan­ning options to show up fully in the software.

I expect that the tech­nique used for the Nikon device could be used with oth­er scan­ners but a sim­pler solu­tion for most scan­ners would just be to pay for and use VueS­can — it is only because the VueS­can soft­ware does­n’t work well for slide scan­ning that I used this con­vo­luted process.

If this guide works for you, please con­sider buy­ing a copy of vues­can — it is their hard work that has made the driver that you are now using! Vues­can isn’t an unreas­on­ably expens­ive product and once pur­chased it will work with mul­tiple scanners.