Samsung SCX-4100 printer/scanner in Win 10

[giomach]

I have almost succeeded in getting my Samsung SCX-4100 printer/scanner, which has been running for years in Vista, to work in Win 10.  But I need advice to complete the job.

I've installed and uninstalled countless Samsung drivers and utilities without success (Easy Printer Manager, Win_OCR, Universal Scan Driver, SmarThru4, etc.), so please don't offer untested software suggestions.  No offence meant, but what would be most helpful would be to hear from someone who has succeeded in doing this, or else who knows for sure that it can't be done.

The device is connected by USB to my Win 10 laptop, using the same cable that I use to Vista.  Whenever I try to run the installer from my old CD in Win 10, it tells me "Device is not connected or power is turned off."  The installation can be made to go ahead to completion, but then a scan says "can't connect to device".  Attempts to scan using VueScan also report that the device is not connected.  Many of the utilities I have tried can't see the device.  And I notice that plugging or unplugging the device's USB does not produce the normal beeps.

But whatever is causing these messages, the device is most certainly connected and powered.  As a printer, it works perfectly.  And, after downloading and installing SCX-4100_Win7_Scan.exe, I have actually been able to scan — but it uses a crude interface called "[Samsung Twain Driver] Version 1.10 (2004)".

So I'm almost there (despite supposedly being not connected or powered).  I would be happy if I could upgrade this Samsung Twain Driver to the much more refined Version 2.02.17 (2006) from my old Vista machine.  But I don't know what file to copy — perhaps someone does know? (There are files on both machines called oem*.dll but the dates are all the same, all 2006; they apparently relate to ScanThru/SmarThru, a more elaborate interface which installs in Win 10 from my old CD but does nothing.)

I'm hoping someone has been down this road.

[giomach]

An update on this saga of the two scanner user interfaces for the Samsung SCX-4100 on my Win 10 machine.

I installed another application (FineReader Pro 5) which supports twain scanning, and this one shows my preferred Samsung interface (v 2.02.17).  Meanwhile the original application (IrfanView) continues to show v 1.10.  Following a hint elsewhere on this site, I installed InspectorTwain, and it shows v 2.02.17.  So clearly both interfaces are present on the Win 10 machine, and it depends on the application which one you get (although I always got v 2.02.17 in IrfanView on my old Vista machine).  I will ask the IrfanView people about this.

It seems that these user interfaces provided by scanner manufacturers are held in files with extension .ds, in windows\twain_32 or a subdirectory thereof.  I have two such files in windows\twain_32\Samsung\Samsung SCX-4100 Series — SCX4100.ds (2004-05-27, 876kb) and OEMDS.DS (2006-12-07, 276kb).  I think these can be identified with v1.10 and v2.02.17 respectively.  I cannot find where applications store the name of their chosen .ds file, if they store it at all.  I have not found a way to make an application use a different .ds file.  If I get an answer elsewhere, I'll let this forum know.

An extra piece of information: installing 20070816143225781_Smarthru4_SCX-4100_Vista.exe allowed the scanner to work, but using the Samsung SmarThru interface, yet another one though not my preferred one.  But it's not bad going for a scanner that much other software declares to be disconnected  or unpowered.

A word of warning: if you are testing, you may try temporarily renaming a directory or a file, to see how an application handles its unavailability.  But don't do this with scanner software!!!  It seems to remember that things are unavailable even after they have been returned to their original names.  It can take a system restore to get things back to normal.