Hope someone can help. I have an acer 310p scanner have tried to use software but my system won't acknowledge the scanner and there is no scanner to choose from when i try to add new hardware. I am not sure what is going on.

You've tried to use WHAT software? Have you installed the scanner driver? :disturbed

if you use the original disk that came with the scanner it should work but check that the scanner is compatible with windows 98 if not get an upgrade

Most hardware devices have several levels of software layers that must be installed correctly in the correct folders / directories, and each one's system registry entry correctly correspond to the detected and powered on hardware peripheral device.

If one or more of these things is missing or wrongly set, then your hardware will not operate in a trouble-free way.

Software layers might include:
1. device driver,
2. driver gui settings/properties pages application,
3. application software that uses / detects the correctly loaded and operating device driver in order to transact user data to / from the device in the primary role(s) of the device.

At one of two boot up and system startup stages a device driver might fail to detect its intended device and exit with an error message logged to the system log file (Event Viewer - System Log). In this case, a connection may be bad, or the hardware smoked / bad / toasted / flaky, or a BIOS (http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?query=bios) setting for an integrated system / mainboard device is wrongly adjusted, or an unlucky Plug-N-Play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) setting for an add-on board was arbitrarily / wrongly set and used by system BIOS (http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?query=bios) and then the device was incorrectly detected by Windows or the operating system itself at a later stage (bad IRQ (http://www.helpwithpcs.com/jargon/irq.htm) or DMA (http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?DMA) channel or Conflicting I/O port ranges--a.k.a. resource conflicts (http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/mbsys/sysResourceConflict-c.html)).

Some BIOSs (http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?query=bios) avoid assigning some settings that are needed by Windows or the operating system in order to correctly detect the device and successfully load the device driver. Some drivers may need an IRQ (http://www.helpwithpcs.com/jargon/irq.htm) that is unique because they cannot handle shared interrrupts (http://www.duxcw.com/faq/irq/irq.htm). When this happens in a PnP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) situation, you might have to remove all the expansion boards in your PC, reset the configuration PnP (http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?plug+and+play) settings, then one at a time add them back in the "correct" order so that Windows or the operating system correctly loads the device drivers for all your devices. The "correct" order may be arbitrary and luck might be involved.

For Microsoft operating systems it is desirable to use a device driver specifically tailored for the specific version you have. This is because Microsoft keeps tweaking the architecture of their OS. The architecture of device drivers has to follow a specific "model" laid out by Microsoft. If you install a driver meant for an earlier version of the operating system, then chances are good that some form of compatibility mode will be attempted. Sometimes this manages to work, but other times this introduces troubles that don't go away.

If you have an older PC with a suitable version of MS Windows on it, consider networking this PC with your newer one(s) and install the older peripheral, its driver, and its application software on the older computer. In this way the data that the peripheral device uses or produces can be moved to or from your newer PC. It is a little bit of a pain in the butt to have the extra clutter, but you have opted to use older peripheral(s) anyway instead of donating them to the needy, and replacing them with the latest bleeding edge equipment (and keeping the engineers who improve things employed to redesign things yet again)...

If you have installed lots of different attempts to get things to work, it might be worth a try to rebuild, and reformat from scratch with BIOS settings recommended by the device manufacturer. Lots of times the system registry gets messed up so that software parameters fool the various layers of software into reporting that your hardware is faulty when, indeed, nothing is wrong with it.

Years ago I found that I had so many expansion cards plugged into my ASUS mainboard that my mainboard was flexing / bending so much that the PCI expansion slots were then farther away from the some of the malfunctioning add-on cards. The remedy that I have been using in that PC was to place a suitable dimensioned piece of supporting material between my mainboard and its case / enclosure. The supporting material had to be non-conducting so as not to cause a short circuit. It had to be suitably sturdy so as to prevent the mainboard from flexing more than 0.5 mm. It also had to be small enough so that the rest of the mainboard would be exposed to free airflow so as to allow on-board IC chips to keep their cool. I chose a wooden block, cut to exact size--et voila, no more flaky expansion card connections with sound cards, SCSI adapters, TV PVR Video Capture cards, USB 2.0 cards, network cards, Firewire cards, etc.

Scanners use either ISIS or Twain device driver interfaces. On WinNT & Win2k the folder C:\WinNT\twain_32 is created. Some Twain scanner sources create subfolders within this one, while others do not.

From my experience every binary Twain driver file has file extension .ds for data source. The Twain specification (http://www.twain.org/) details the programming aspects of interacting with a twain data source. A couple of system registry entries are setup for twain itself for the default data source, but the majority of registry entries are device manager & scanner vendor related. The twain organization (http://www.twain.org/) has some windows software for the latest flavour of twain including a twain source .ds software that provides a single .bmp or .gif or .jpg file with the twain logo in it and this simple twain source will "scan in" various versions of this twain logo graphic file to whatever graphics application you want to test out this source from. It may come in 16 and 32-bit form?

Once this simple twain test data source is working on your computer, then you know that it is just a matter of getting the scanner's device twain driver to interact with your scanner peripheral and that with your graphics software to acquire data from the scanner instead of the test data source.

Good luck...

on a Win M.E i had to change the Device Configuration (Parallel Port Mode ) in the bios for scanner to work