Windows 2000 vs the modern world.

Nov 08, 2023Raphaël Stradiot
Windows 2000 vs the modern world.

The Fuji Sp3000 is one of the best scanners out there and we love using it for our Medium Format scans.

But compared to our Virtualised Fuji SP500 scanners it’s a bit slow.

So one of our grandest desires was to get this scanner virtualised too. When you get these scanners hooked to a modern PC their speed can go up by 3-4x.

Unfortunately with this scanner is just not that easy. It’s a machine controlled by 2 computers, one running windows XP and one Windows 2000. The windows XP is fairly easy to do and we’ve been running it virtually since we opened, but the windows 2000 machine, that controls the scanner, is another story.

 It uses super old FireWire connectors that make the process a lot harder. 3 years ago we spent weeks trying different combinations of hardware to get it to work to no avail.

Until recently when a fine lad from the UK contacted us with the promesse to get our machines virtualised easily and rapidly. He has done it with other labs with great success so we flew him over and got to work and it worked! I was really impressed, but only for two days… After a hardware change to speed the computer up. the machine crashed and we were unable to connect it again.




And here we are, back from holidays with 100s of films to scan and no working scanner. What is worse is that we weren’t even able to reconnect the old computer as the hard drive we used to copy the software had “disappeared”.

So we had to think fast. We spent days and nights straight working on this machine. We tried different CPUs, different FireWire cards, bought in total 6 different computers but nothing worked. Our English virtualisation expert is left confused as it is the first time he is having problems like that.

 

So we settled on doing a fresh install of windows 2000 on the physical machine, just to be able to work again. We’re back at square one but we’re not giving up! It’s our dream to get this machine virtualised. We received new computers again that seem like a better option and will try different using different FujiFilm softwares to improve compatibility. Let’s pray this time it works.

 

To be continued…