HP Scanjet G4050 Windows 11 work around

[Brian_1945]

HP are not supporting their G4050 flatbed scanner for Windows 11.

I tried dual booting to Windows 10 but still found problems - the scanner would lock up after scanning a few pages to pdf.

It used to work with early versions of Windows 10. I'm guessing features of Windows 11 have been incorporated in Windows 10 updates. I began to think there was a hardware failure with the scanner.

I have an old laptop running Windows 10. Tried that (I had kept the HP setup full G4050 140 222 download to install the software). Success - the scanner works.

Comparing, my old laptop runs 32 bit windows 10. My new Windows 11 machine is 64 bit. The Windows 10 I dual booted was also 64 bit. The HP software looks as if it was originally for 32 bit machines. It should run on a 64 bit machine and there is something in Windows which adapts the drivers. I'm guessing it is this which no longer works well. Windows 11 does not have a 32 bit version.

So the next issue was can I dual boot a 32 bit version of Windows 10? I think this is only possible with memory of 4MB, so no.

My next approach was to run Windows 10 32 bit version on a virtual machine. I used Oracle VM Virtual box which is free download. The Windows 10 installation media can also be downloaded and I didn't need an additional license. This seems to be successful - need more testing to be certain. Scan is slow but I allocated minimum resources to the Virtual Machine so it might be tuneable.

This was a long learning process. Virtual Machines were new to me and have only learned the minimum to get going. The documentation is massive. 

Hope this is useful for others attempting to keep their G4050 scanner operational.

Unfortunately the original Windows 10 full software is no longer available on the HP website. I haven't found it anywhere else but it might exist. I had kept the download. My original CD will not load to Windows 10. I'm not sure if the basic drivers (still on the HP site) work well - I found problems with all the scanner apps I tried.