Walmart appears to be jump starting the holiday season with a pretty good deal on a Compaq CQ50-139WM laptop for only $298. As is typical with Walmart this seems to be configured specifically for Walmart. The laptop has a w/ Intel Celeron Processor 575, 160G drive, 2G of ram and Vista Home Basic.

I was strolling through Best Buy today and noticed the Asus – Eee PC. This wasn’t the first time I heard of them but I never saw one in person. The model was the EEE PC 900 and was $449. This model has windows XP loaded on it. The keyboard was a nice size and the thing was light as hell. The 8.9″ screen seemed a little washed out. Maybe it could be corrected with some adjustments.

I imagine most people are buying these as a second computer and basically want an internet appliance. For about $50 less you can get the linux version which is fine for surfing the net.

I didn’t realize the ¢ wasn’t on a normal keyboard. To type the ¢ cents symbol hold down the ALT key and then type in 155 on the number pads. You may have to toggle Num Lock. For some reason it won’t work with the numbers above the letters on my keyboard.

¢¢¢

I received an email from BUY.com with their weekly specials. They have a Western Digital 500GB External Hard Drive for $138.95. I have a smaller version of this drive and it is excellent. I don’t think I will ever buy an internal slave drive again. External drives like this are great for performing backups ans storing large video files. Link.

Like a lot of people I have a ton of old photos stored in boxes. I have always wanted to find some kind of automatically feed the pictures to the scanner like commercial printers have.

I did a Google search for “scanner with automatic feed” and “automatic photo scanner”, “scanner with feeder” etc. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of vendors that provide this type of product. There are plenty of choices for photo scanners with slide and negative adapters.

It turn out that at one time Epson made a scanner that did exactly what I wanted. It was the Epson Perfection 2480 Limited Edition Photo Scanner

I also found the HP ScanJet 5530 Scanner but it had less than stellar reviews.

I then found out that Epson still has the Multi Photo Business Card Feeder B12B813372 available. I did some searching and the retail price goes for about $149 for the feeder. The feeder works with the Perfection 2480, 2580, 3490 & 3590 Scanners. The only problem is that these particular models are no longer readily available.

I of course searched ebay and scored a Sealed Epson 2580 scanner for $85 shipped. Cool !
So for about $235 I have a pretty cool scanner than can autofeed photos and also scan negatives and slides.

There were essentially no instructions with the automatic feeder. I soon discovered that all the documentation is installed on your computer when you install the software for the scanner. Once I read the Reference Guide installation of the feeder was very easy.

The largest photos that can be scanned are 4X6. Epson says you can stack up to 25 photos in the tray.

So far the scanner has worked perfectly. It sucks the photos in and when the scan is complete it spits them back out. The total time per photo is about 30 seconds. Normally this would be a slow pace to work but you can just set a stack of photos in the tray and go off and do other things. I’m guessing I can scan about 100 photos per hour pretty easily.

I’ll report back in a few weeks once I really start to go to town. I am going to be using Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 to scan and organize the photos.

I have received the following error message on a number of my computers:

Application failed to initialize: 0×800106ba. A problem caused Windows Defender Service To Stop. To start the service, restart your computer or search help and support on how to start a service manually.

Apparently a lot of people are receiving this error as well when they start their computer. It looks like the license has expired for Windows Defender and we are supposed to install the latest version.

How lame is it that it’s not on autoupdate or the error message give a little more help as to the exact nature of the problem with Windows Defender.