[Athen] Canon scanner question

[Deborah Armstrong via athen-list]

The answer is probably no, but here's the situation. A long time ago I had a Canon high speed scanner, DR 50 something. I think it was a DR5090, but I'm not entirely sure. When Windows 7 came out, there were no longer drivers that worked with it, though the scanner itself worked fine.
So I convinced my department to spend another $7,000 on a DR 8090  scanner which is still working fine.
But Windows 10 came out, again, no drivers supported it.
So I hid my Windows 7 PC under my desk, even though we had strict rules to surplus all our old computers due to Windows 7 no longer being updated.
Five years later, and if I still want a high-speed scanner that works with modern Windows 11, I'm going to have to beg again. And it is silly, because this scanner still works just fine. Also the college wants to avoid spending money it does not need to spend.
So I continue to hide the PC controlling this scanner and wonder if anyone has a better solution.
I did try running the scanners in a VM, both when Windows XP became deprecated and after that Windows 7, but the drivers would not communicate with the virtual machine. If anyone has had luck doing this, let me know.
With such an expensive scanner, I'm disappointed that Canon has refused twice to keep its drivers updated for modern operating systems. I know it is in their best interest to sell new models, but they could have sold new drivers for a few bucks and kept cash flow going that way as well.
I worry a little about continuing to run Windows 7 just so I can use this scanner, but I also don't want to explain why I want a new one when this one works fine.

--Debee

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman22.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20250429/0de2f46b/attachment.html>