Little Scanning Help Here, Please!

[Tsaiko]

I've scanned a lot of cards in the past and have gotten pretty good results. If you've seen any of the scans I've posted they are the right size without any scroll bars or wasted space. Now all of a sudden, I'm getting inconsistant results, with most results getting the extra space and scroll bars. I haven't changed the settings on my scanner and can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. If anyone could offer some advice what to try to go back to getting simple scans, I'd appreciate it. It's really not that important, since these are all my paper loss commons, but eventually I'll want to post scans on ebay for some of these.

I'm using an all in one HP Photosmart 2570 series printer/scanner, if that helps at all.

Thanks for any help.

Sample of what I'm talking about, below. I don't really want to take the time to go back and crop all these scans...there's got to be a better way.

[Clutch-Hitter]

Place the subject on the scanner and preview it first. The scanner will scan the entire length of the space and provide the preview.

Movable dotted lines should appear. From there, you can move the little dotted lines around the subject pictured in the preview,

and once that is done, you can start the actual scan.

I hope that makes sense....

[D. Bergin]

Yeah, you must have been using an automatic cropping default that switched off some how.

I always scan how "Clutch-Hitter" mentioned. Do a preview scan. Manually crop the image and then a regular scan. Cuts down on mistakes and overlapping from the default scan settings.

[Tsaiko]

Thanks guys, something is probably funky with my scanner. Tomorrow I'll try again, after unplugging everything and doing some computer house keeping.

I used to just press Start Scan on the printer itself and all would be good, except every once in a while. Now the only way I can get a "tight" scan is if I select scan "document" - not picture and I do this in the software. When previewing after selecting "picture" the lines around the whole scan don't want to move. Scanning under document the lines draw around the card and it's ok. And for some reason the software won't let me paste the name, so I can add "back" to it, for the back. A few extra steps, in an already tedious job.
I checked all the defaults and everything seems as it was.
I'll figure it out.