Scanning Software Advice

Hello everyone,

I've got a fairly typical low user type of set up - a fairly decent Dell running Windows XP and a Dell 3 in 1 Printer Scanner.

Now, what I want to do is scan a fairly large book of notes - they are bound (and I don't have an auto feed), so I will be turning pages manually every time - time consuming, but yet I don't have much call to be scanning large amounts anyways, so don't mind about that.

My question is, what is the best way to go about scanning - what is the best (of my pre-existing software) should I use?

What I SEEM to have available is Microsoft Office Imaging and Microsoft Office Scanning utilities. I have not being too successful with this - it scan ok for the first two pages, and then whilst scanning the third and subsequent pages I get a 'Scanning interrupted' message and have to click resume - fine, but annoying and time consuming. (See screen shot below for this)

The other way I’ve tried was using Dells own software - at first I tried 'send scanned image' to MS Document imaging programme, but it doesn't recognise the file type. Then I told it to send the image to Microsoft Word - it sends the text there (which is great, I didn't even know I had OCR!, I think it uses ABBYY finereader tools for this) - however, not all of the document is THAT clear for OCR, is a photocopy itself, and some of the words are faded, so I’d prefer to keep the scans as image rather than text. So, is there any other application I could send the scanned images to, that would cumulate them into one document (and not to large in overall size)?

Or would anyone have any other suggestions on how to go about this task? Any advice appreciated, but I don't want to buy any new software - as this is not something I do regularly - as I say, I have Microsoft office on a dell running XP...

Thanks

Martin