I will recommend Vuescan as well if you want to get almost any scanner working in Windows.
As for some of the other issues mentioned:
- Apple stuff is very good, but it's not magic. If you just want to get to B&W images, I think you're on the right track with your current setup. If you want to get text from documents, I have used my iPhone to take a photo of the documents in question and I am then able to select the text on the photo and copy that to a document. There are errors, but going through the text and correcting those is a lot quicker than having to type the whole lot myself.
- Learning how to use levels in images will help you a lot. I am not a Gimp user myself so cannot help you there but it is the most-used function on Photoshop for me.
- When working with images and scans you run into the dpi and ppi settings and that may lead to what you described: a very small scanned image on a very large canvas. When scanning, you set the dpi setting the scanner/software uses. 300 dpi means that any inch on the image is translated using 300 dots or pixels. So more dpi equals more data in your image. Setting it low may lead to the small image you saw in Gimp. If you want to print stuff again, you are once again translating pixels to a physical size on a piece of paper. If you don't have enough pixels you get a fuzzy image. Depending on your printer, 200 or 300 ppi may work well but for high quality print work (photos and such) you may need a much larger number. If Gimp starts with a large canvas of a couple of thousand pixels on each side and you then load a scanned image that is only a couple of hundred pixels wide... you end up with the situation you described. Stretching that scanned image so it fits the canvas will make it fuzzy, as you cannot add information. Either starting with a smaller canvas in Gimp (that fits the size you want to print at) and/or scanning at a higher dpi will get these parameters closer together.
Apologies if I'm teaching you how to suck eggs and such.... hope this helps.