I've hesitated to post this on the grounds of being called a jammy sod, but I recently saw a Minolta Scan Elite 5400 film scanner on Gumtree at the "worth a punt" price of £10. The owner said it had worked years ago, but he couldn't get it to work now on his modern computer. Suspecting that Vuescan might be the answer, the deal was done and it duly scanned several frames of film before just giving up. Since then, it has been an adventure every time I switch it on, but a succession of blank scans seemed to indicate a light source problem. Before pulling it apart, however, I loaded the Minolta software onto my old Vista laptop just in case that might work, but no joy and only the horror of how long installing software etc used to take in the old days.
Flushed with my lack of success, I tried it once more with my desktop and it has scanned the same slides and negs that have come out blank the last few times I have tried them. Pity they're all out of focus, mind, but I've rescanned the one I was going to use in the "Gone but not forgotten" comp. Technology, eh?

It's the view from my front window before they built a whole stack of houses in the field beside me.
