How to Do Everything With Your Scanner- P18 pptx

It includes your computer’s hard drive usually the C drive, your floppy disk, and CD-ROM drives.. How to Check the Available Space on Your Hard Drive You can you tell in advance of begin

Installing Additional RAM

You can install additional RAM in your computer provided your computer has the

necessary expansion slots to accommodate it Expansion slots are places inside a computer

that allow you to insert additional RAM chips or cards containing additional RAM chips

If you’re not sure if you have the expansion slots in your computer to upgrade the RAM, check the documentation that came with your computer You can hire a

pro-fessional to actually install the RAM, or consult a resource such as How to Do Everything with Your PC (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 2000).

You definitely will notice increased speed and performance from additional RAM If your computer has the necessary expansion slots to upgrade your RAM, it’s usually very cost effective to do so Buy as much RAM

as you can afford.

Storage Space for Your Images

In addition to RAM, which is temporary memory, you computer also has permanent memory This is the memory that saves information and projects after you’ve turned

your computer off It’s referred to as hard disk or permanent storage It includes your

computer’s hard drive (usually the C drive), your floppy disk, and CD-ROM drives

How Much Hard Drive Space Do You Need?

Image files consume a lot of space A single image file, scanned at high resolution, can take up to 100 megabytes of space You’ll find yourself very cramped if you have only one or two gigabytes of hard drive space In fact, when you try to store images, you might get a message telling you that there is insufficient space on your designated drive

Most computers today come with hard drives of 10 gigabytes or more A driving force behind this is the industry recognition that users are doing things such as digital imaging that require a lot more space—both for the programs and the files

How to Check the Available Space on Your Hard Drive

You can you tell in advance of beginning a scanning project how much space is available on your hard drive and whether you’re going to run into a problem Follow these steps to see exactly how much room you have to work with:

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FIGURE 4-2 Your computer’s drives

2. Right-click the icon for the C drive, and select Properties from the pop-up menu A Properties dialog box, similar to the one shown in Figure 4-3, appears

3. Click OK, Cancel, or the × button in the upper righthand corner of the dialog box to exit once you’ve finished viewing the hard drive space

As a rule of thumb, I usually figure on about a megabyte for each image Also, keep in mind that your scanner software and image-editing programs, themselves, take up a lot of hard drive space—as much as 40 or 50 megabytes apiece.

As with memory, more is better when it comes to hard drive space Some-thing in the 8 to 20 gigabyte range should be nice and roomy Experts recommend that you plan to use 10 percent of the total capacity for temp files to be created when editing image files.

FIGURE 4-3 Checking the available hard drive space

The Limitations of Floppy Disks

If you have only a standard floppy disk drive to supplement the storage available on your computer, this probably isn’t enough A standard floppy disk holds 1.44 megabytes

of information A single high-resolution image can consume 2 megabytes, which is well beyond the capabilities of that floppy Although most images at standard resolutions are less than 1 megabyte, you can’t get more than one on a floppy even if you do com-promise the quality of the image by decreasing the resolution Floppy disks are a pretty inconvenient way to supplement the space available on a cramped hard drive

Adding Disk Storage Space

If you have a small hard drive, it might be time to think about supplementing it with one of the following options:

Adding a larger hard drive You can replace the existing hard drive on your computer with a larger one It’s a matter of backing up everything on your existing

Graphic representation

of available space Total disk capacity

Exact amounts of used and free space

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makes you queasy, you can add more space by purchasing an external hard drive like the External Solutions model shown in Figure 4-5 You simply plug the device into your computer, like any other peripheral device External hard drives cost about $150 to $200, and you can add up to 18 gigabytes of space You can find several models at the External-Solutions website, located at www.external-solutions.com

FIGURE 4-4 Get help installing a new hard drive on the HardwareCentral website.

FIGURE 4-5 An external hard drive is an easy solution.

A high-capacity disk drive Zip drives and Jaz drives are external devices that allow you to add a drive to your computer They use special, high-capacity diskettes Figure 4-6 shows a Zip drive, and Figure 4-7 shows you what a Jaz drive looks like Both of these devices use high-capacity storage disks Using

a Zip disk, you can store an additional 100 to 250 megabytes of information

Jaz drives afford you 1 or 2 gigabytes of extra storage Iomega is the market leader for these devices, and you can find their extensive website at www.iomega.com/jaz

A recordable CD-ROM drive The advantage of CDs is that they are remarkably portable high-capacity storage devices Since nearly everyone with a PC has (or will eventually have) access to a CD drive, CDs are a great way to store and share

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