Meme-Free Zone

My main reason for buying another PC (rather than say a Mac) was (a) because I needed to get up and running in a hurry after my old machine went phut and (b) to keep compatibility with existing software.

The most expensive software I own is Caere's Omnipage Pro OCR package, which I use to scan old books etc. for the Forgotten Futures games collections and CD-ROM. Last upgrade I had was to release 10, they are now on 14. What I didn't know is that 10 is not Windows XP compatible. Three guesses what OS is on the new computer... And three guesses what is the lowest version they now support (hint, it's 1 more than 10)...

So on top of the cost of the PC, I now have to look at a new OCR package. There don't seem to be any cheap upgrades on offer from Caere, unless I'm missing something, so I might as well try others too. Anyone have any suggestions. I need to support the following:

• A Umax 1220S SCSI scanner, preferably directly driven rather than through a TWAIN interface.
• Large documents (mostly in chunks of 20-30 pages but occasionally more)
• A range of typefaces, portrait and landscape layout, multiple columns, documents with mixed text and graphics.
  
• Sometimes really crappy small typefaces.

I like Omnipage but it isn't cheap; if anyone can suggest alternatives please let me know about them.

I wanted an animated Slayers / CSI icon. This is my first attempt,I'm not sure if it's excessive or not. It's unfortunately too big a file to be a livejournal icon, but I might use it for occasional stories in my BtVS/CSI crossover series.

Later - slowed the sequence and changed the order slightly, seems to work better for me.