All,

I've recently purchased a Canon scanner for my office. The main reason I bought it is that it doesn't have a power pack and is powered through the USB. This means it can be easily switched between machines.

Unfortunately the software canon bundle with this is really unhelpful and unintuitive, so I'm looking for some freeware software which is really quite simple, that basically allows you to scan and save, with some options such as dpi/ colour, b+w etc...

What do people use?

Have you thought about using Photoshop for it if you're looking for simplicity?

I've personally never used it but i know you're able to ..

File -> Import and your scanner should be listed there... Play with it see if you it does the job for you.

I also have a Canon scanner. The Photoshop > Import option is only going to bring up your scanner software, not something that's a part of Photoshop. I don't know of any free scanner software; you're better off using the Canoscan crap. You can download a demo of Silverfast website and see if you like that.

I like the Canoscan crap.....
Mine has a "professional" option that might be more useful.

Dezmarie is right. The import option just brings up the Canon software.

My HP scanner crap is a 200+ meg download. 200 megs! For scanner drivers! Why, back when I was first computing, we had games that fit on a 170K disk -- with room to spare for 5 more games!
-z, thoroughly incensed

The problem I have is that not everyone has Photoshop, so I was looking for a standalone simple piece of software which allows you to scan and save...