Brother MFC4800 Scanner kicking my tail

[dolfinwriter]

I have had a MFC4800 for over a year, and it has worked fine scanning and printing until now. I'm trying to scan a bunch of old IRA statements and other papers to burn to a CD so I can purge and shred the papers. I've had a problem with it for a couple of days now, which seems now to be a problem in the printer/scanner unit itself.

When I click Scan, I get this message, "Unable to communicate with Twain device."

Or it says "1 page scanned" without doing anything at all.

I'm running WinXP and a USB connector. I've powered it off and on numerous times. I've uninstalled and reinstalled both the printer and Paperport (Ver. 9.0) a couple of times, including using Brother's uninstall utility for this device, and Scansoft's uninstall utility for PaperPort.

I scoured the registry for and deleted every entry relating to the device and to PaperPort.

I thought maybe someone had pinched the USB cable just one too many times (long story), so I replaced it, to no avail. I've tried three different (new) cables with no change in behavior.

I do have one question about cables--is there any type of special USB cable for these devices as there are parallel cables for printers?

I tried connecting the USB cable to a case rear USB port instead of the front port. Same thing.

I tried connecting it to my work laptop (also running WinXP and Paperport 9.0), instead of the desktop PC. Same thing.

I'm at a loss and would appreciate any suggestions.

 

[doggard]

See if this helps:Problem Communicating with TWAIN Device USB Troubleshooting Steps

As to USB printer cables apart from the different ends you can get them in they are much the same[apart from the quality].There are USB2 and USB 1.1 cables but the better quality 1.1 cables will work on USB2 systems if they have adequate shielding incorporated in their design.

 

[dolfinwriter]

I uninstalled and then reinstalled the driver one more time, and now it works.

I do need to get a better cable, tho.

Thanks!

 

[xeony2k]

I have a Brother MFC-4800 also. It was perfect for my home office, until I installed the new driver files they sent me. Now I cannot use PaperPort 8 or 9. Why -o- why did I do that? Tech support has been no help and I cannot seem to be able to roll back to what I had previously. No matter what I do, I have the new WIA driver. The driver uninstall utility does not seem to work.

Anyway, I use XP and connect to it parallel as opposed to USB as mentioned above. I really think the problem is the WIA driver they use for XP. Before I was using the 2K driver with no issues, which is/was a TWAIN driver. When I bought it, they did not have the "XP" compatible driver, but the 2K driver worked... with everything.

The scanner now only works with Paint Brush and the MS Scanner Utility... which does me no good. I scan multi-page documents for the most part. It made my home office really tick. PaperPort, Adobe, Photo Shop or any other application now gives me a "Unable to communicate with Twain device."

Does anyone have any ideas on this? I have contacted Brother several times and they are now claiming it is a PaperPort issue. They are supposed to support the PaperPort they include on the disc... but they told me there is no fix. I really need to remedy this or find another feed scanner that works

 

[digiscribe]

I am having the same problem as xeony2k. I have a Brother MFC-5840 which came with Paperport 9. It is wired to my router which I access wirelessly from my laptop. I'm running XP Home on my laptop. The Multi-Function Center (MFC) prints just fine but it won't scan. I have uninstalled the WIA driver using both the uninstall tool from Brother (DelInf32.exe) and by using the add/remove programs tool in XP. I've then tried reinstalling it using the driver from the installation disk and, when that didn't work, from the Brother website. (I also uninstalled and reinstalled Paperport). Nothing has worked. I still get the "unable to communicate with TWAIN device". I'm pretty certain this is a Brother problem rather than a Paperport problem. By the way, I agree with everyone that Brother tech support is terrible. I e-mailed them over a week ago but they have yet to respond. I'm wondering if xeony2k was able to solve his/her problem without buying a new scanner or if anyone else has any tips on how to solve this frustrating issue. Anyone know if there is some other driver that can be used maybe? Thanks.

 

[xeony2k]

Wow, this is a blast from the past. No I never did solve that mystery and I bought a new machine eventually. I now have a MFC-8460D, which I really like. When I installed this particular mult-function device it had an option in its program group to enable TWAIN. It works with everything unlike that disaster I had with the MFC-4800. I finally at some point got someone with a clue at Brother tech who acknoledged the problem I was having with my 4800... but they had no fix for it. Good luck with your current printer!

 

[digiscribe]

Okay, I solved my "problem". This should be a lesson for everyone to check the easiest thing first. For some reason my Norton firewall was blocking access to the scanner. Please feel free to ridicule me for not figuring this out in the first 5 minutes of being unable to scan. I hesitated about whether to post back my idiocy but I suppose there is a slim chance that someone else may have the same problem someday and similarly forget to check the obvious.

 

[xeony2k]

Kudos for posting the solution. If it happened to you it is bound to happen to someone else. Years ago I was installing a CD-ROM but could not get the drive to show up in windows. I could go to it in DOS fine. It turns out I had TweakUI installed and it has an setting to only show certain drives... I felt like an idiot after chasing my tail on that one for a while with driver updates, BIOS, chipset research and etc. But, I'm sure someone else may have benefited from my oversight.

 

[Cryogenius]

I had this problem with a Brother MFC-440CN which I am operating on a home network. The computers on the network have fixed IP addresses and I fixed the IP address of the MFC too, and gave it a name in the MFC's TCP/IP network setup. The MFC worked fine for printing and FAXing but the scanning function did not work and gave the above error message after saying the device was not connected make sure it is on, etc.

I solved the problem by going Control Panel->Printers and Other Hardware->Scanners and Cameras->Brother MFC-440CN LAN and right click. Click the Network Setting tab and there is the choice to specify your machine by name or specify your machine by IP address. In my case the name was specified, so I changed to IP address and made sure the IP address was that of the MFC. Then I went back to the General tab and hit the test button and the diagnostic message said everything was OK. The scanner then worked within Paperport.