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Dear Arvydas,
your question is always a very good one for many core facilities and institutes with point scanning confocals. While it seems on occasion the readiness, capability or possibilities for vendors to maintain a certain older generation system in good functional state the motivation to promote the sales of new ones with more goodies never stalls.

Based on my information and/or experiences there is a significant proportion of users who will use a confocal even when they would be well off with a good wide-field and/or deconvolution (as George suggested, fully copy that!). The reasons for this are too many fold to get into details (availability, ingorance, unawareness, politics) but surely cutting the proportion of samples that would not need a confocal to minimum would save a lot of working hours for your lasers. The politics part is in itself pretty interesting as in particular in high ranking prestige institutes the users are urged to use the best possible equipment instead of the most suitable. It is for a PI surely more lucrative in a meeting to mention the data was recorded with a 1 million bucks confocal of latest design than on a 20 years old widefield. This is part of the corporate profile where no institute wants to be poorer than the other one. So de facto one reason for this waste of resources can be egoistic one.

Now comes the commercial part, feel free to read or change the channel: As a local distributor for a laser-free spinning disk confocal add-on systems I quite often see systems with optically good microscope frame with dead lasers. Even more often when having a demo on my systems I come across users who are absolutely fascinated to have an alternative to use a system that generates equal data in a more elegant way...and consequently really happy to have alternatives that do the job without too much gadgets (or buttons/options to learn).

Make the story short: perhaps next time when the laser battery or the scan head needs to be replaced one could consider either a good wide field with a good well documented and user controllable deconvolution and/or an after sales add-on alternative?

Wishing you lot of luck with the present system, though!

>m