The scanning is going well, but the scanner crashed whilst working on a large document. I had about 75 sheets to scan in the 350 page document before it stopped. Thankfully I was able to save the data that was already scanned in (about 275 sheets) and when I reboot the PC I will be able to scan the other 75 sheets and attach them to the end of the document.

I have never quite worked out why it crashes, but I have found that it normally takes over a thousand sheets to cause it to crash, so it sounds like some type of memory leak. A memory leak is when a program asks the operating system to use some memory to do something, and then returns most of it, but not all. And then requests some more memory, returning most of that lot. Often it will only be a few bytes that get forgotten about, but when an operation is performed a large number of times, they add up.

And then that does not leave enough memory for other programs which causes an issue for the stability of the operating system. Another way programs fail is if they ask for the memory up front from the operating system in one go, and then try to manage the memory themselves, and fail to return all the memory to the program itself. In which case the program might crash instead of the computer.

The final thing that might happen is if programs request a lot of small blocks of memory, and then return only some of them at any point, the memory will become fragmented just like a Hard Disk. The memory will look like swiss cheese. What will happen is that the operating system will try to allocate more memory out of the holes and will either fail or have to move all the holes together to get things to work.

95% of IT projects are not delivered on time

According to this Article linked to by SlashDot.Org, 95% of IT projects are not completed on time. Also, Microsoft has just released an SP1 update to Windows Server 2003.