I own an EPSON scanner. It is not that old. It is a Perfection 1260 scanner. It works pretty well, and given that I do not need to buy a new one.
But it works pretty well in Mac OS X, because Mac does not need EPSON drivers, or it might not work properly. In Windows 7 the scanner simply does not work. There is not a driver from EPSON for this windows version. Worst than not having a driver (that should be made available freely, as the customer doesn’t should need to buy anything to make the hardware he bought to work on most recent operating systems) is suggesting the customer to BUY a third party software (VueScan).
Basically, EPSON is admitting incompetence: “Hey, we are not able to develop a driver for our own hardware, but there is some guy that have a good software that does the thing we should do…“