I have used the MS951, but I am not familiar with the 950. The 951 is not a pistol grip, it has a straight handle with a gentle curve at the reader head. If yours resembles this, is was probably the previous version. This scanner is available with several cable options: RS-232, Wedge, and XT/PS2 wye-cable. If this unit has a wye-cable and hooks in series with the keyboard, this rules-out any wedge problems.

Pick out a well printed barcode and scan it. Do you get a visual and audible indication of a good scan? Some scanners "Beep" on good and bad reads, only the tone varies. The 951 has a green/red led display to indicate read status. Try some other barcode types UPC, Code39, ect... Correct power-on sequence for the 951 is: Red LED flash, Green LED, followed by a single beep.

If everything looks good to this point, programming could be the problem. The programming manual may long be lost, but scanners are programmed by scanning barcodes printed in this manual and it is possible to program a scanner to appear "dead" (I never understood why!). These codes do not usually transfer well in the PDF manual download, but it is worth a try. There are some metrologic utilities that can program some keyboard wye's but I have never tried the so thay may just be an urban legend.

Lastly is mechanical/electrical failure. Does the keyboard work OK with this unit?

PS: By the way, Active-X barcode is available. They compute barcode checksums for printing, some can decode undecoded scanner, ect... All that I have found are geared toward VB and don't interact with a VFP report.

>Yes, That is the way I have it setup and it works with another scanner from a different manufacturer, but this particular scanner does not seem to work.
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>---- I'm beginning to think that the scanner is defective... or not programmed correctly.
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