scanning advice

I've been scanning in some maps and charts from books and atlases, at 600 dpi, color. Paintshop pro can REALLY choke on these (wanting to use 1.5gb+ RAM) when manipulating the images. What DPI would an atlas/book normally use? Am I overdoing it? Are they normally just 256 color? (Seems like PSP does it in 32 bit by default). Doing this stuff REALLY taxes my system, and I'm sure that 600dpi is overkill, I just don't know by how much...

you will need to figure out what resolution would be best for your picture.

for example.

if you scan a 8 x 6 picture at 600 dots(pixels) per inch, then you would have

8 x 600= 4800
6 x 600= 3600

4800x3600

at 300 dpi

8 x 300= 2400
6 x 300= 1800

2400x1800