You ask about power for the scanner but the real issue is what you must do downstream with the scan. Need big memory? Yes, of course, the bigger the better. My computer has 1.5 GB, several drives so the scratch disks are in separate drives. I watched the task manager in Windows XP while Photoshop was processing a 400 MB file. Memory use was a breeze, lots left. CPU usage was something else, it was at 100% usage most of the time the file was being processed. Previously I had thought increasing memory to 2GB to speed up the very slow processing. Lesson? Wrong! What I need is a faster CPU. My 1.8 GHZ CPU does not cut it anymore. Also, my memory is old 133 MHZ SDRAM, not high speed DDR. Thus I have enough but slow memory and a slow CPU so there is a bottleneck at the memory, even though there are lots of it, and another at the CPU.
There is a great deal of freedom and savings in putting together a superb top end PC and benefit in the tremendous range of excellent software available at competitive prices.
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