Why do things have to be so hard?

A long time ago, well several years anyway, I bought a PC magazine that had Paperport 6 on the cover disk. This application claimed an end to the clutter of paper by enabling you to scan and archive all that paper you accumulate, and lead us into the paperless world. Yeah, right.

Actually, it was a pretty damn fine piece of software - at least for a home user, and I used it a lot. After a while though, things inevitably started to drop off the radar and I became less robust in my scanning. Perhaps it was bigger hard disks, ease of access to data and information from the Internet or just plain laziness.

A couple of years ago I decided to try again, and started by purchasing Paperport 10. During my absence, ownership of the product had changed hands - it's now owned by Nuance. It worked OK but wasn't quite as "snappy" as the earlier version I had, despite my (by then) far faster XP PC. Anyway, to cut a long story short it fell out of use fairly quickly. This weekend, for some reason, I decided to have another blast - maybe it's all the cricket papers flying around since I became chairman - so I tried installing my copy of v10 on my Vista machine. Here's where the problems started.

My scanner - now several years old used the Scanmaker 5 scanner driver. Vista won't have this, and it falls over every time I install it. There's no update around, and belive me, I've tried looking. I can't find a generic scanner driver that will work either, but at least Vista recognises the scanner, so at least I have the bog standard Vista scanning capabilities, but belive me, they are bog standard.

And so to Paperport. It took me about 5 tries before I got the damn thing installed - fell over at various stages but eventually got it done - or so I thought. Fired it up, and it froze. End task, reboot, start again. Same result. It's telling me the scan manager has stopped working but doesn't enhance with any reason or solution. Bottom line is, it's not recognising the scanner. After about another 3 tries I've given up.

I have tried Nuance's customer support before, but I wasn't going to bother this time. It's appalling.

Googled for Paperport alternatives, and saw a link to a program called Docs Vault, which has a Home version, so I thought I'd have a look at this. So far, I've downloaded the installer, but now I appear to have to downlaod and install the .Net Framework (whatever that is). It's a 39mb download, which I've done, and it's now installing. Gawd knows what it's doing to my PC's innards.

Fingers crossed. Did I create a restore point?

All I want to do is scan in my mortgage statement.......

UPDATE
I installed the .NET Framework (v3.5) and treid to install Docs Vault. It tells me that I have to install the .NET Framework v1.1.4xxx and would I like to go to Micorsoft's website to download it? Aaargghhh!!!

Uninstalled, and though I'd try v2.xxxxx, but my PC is telling me I already have that installed (presumably by default when I bought the bloody thing). Have quietly, and patiently submitted a ticket to the Docs Vault website, asking if they can advise me how I can install their lovely software to give it a try.

I'm going to find something to kick.