A GIF animation works on the same principal.  The artist creates a series of pictures, like those pictured above, and using a piece of software (such as Microsoft's GIF Animator for Windows), chains the images together in a series of Frames.  When saved and subsequently viewed within the browser, each frame is displayed to the viewer for a set time.   Unlike traditional animation, the creator can set how long each individual frame is displayed and other viewing attributes, such as how each frame transitions into each other and if the image has any transparency or not.

One of the largest benefits of animated GIFs is that they can be very small in size, quickly created, and require no additional plug-ins or downloads on the side of the viewer.  The downside is that an animation can play at variables speeds depending on the processor speed of the viewer, and like any other graphic, colors can appear different depending on screen resolution, color depth, browser, etc.

Further Reading:

• GIF98a Specification
• Tutorial on Animated GIF creation

One of the tasks I perform quite often is the scanning in of receipts; sometimes individual, sometimes all taped to a single paper when submitting an expense report to my client.  Unlike a flat-bed scanner, smaller paper items are harder to scan in because there is often not enough material for the rollers and other assorted internal mechanics to properly work with.  To assist in this, I quite often tape the receipt to normal sized paper and then scan the whole thing in, editing away the extra later.  Over time, I find that my scans degrade with the same horizontal lines that you are noticing.  The culprit? bits of glue that adhere to the scanner glass and become very dirty over time.  It is often less noticeable in color scans because the scanner isn't converting ever non-white element into black.

Although I would double check the cleaning guidelines with the vendor first, I often find that I can clean the scanner glass by using a rubbing-alcohol moistened paper (rubbing alcohol placed into any spray bottle that produces a fine mist will work).  Running the moist page thru the scanner often cleans the bulk of the gunk from the glass.  More stubborn gunk is often loosened on multiple passes.  After the last pass, running a dry page thru can help "dry" the glass as well as tell you if you have succeeded in your quest.  Really bad sticks might require a more intense cleaning.  I will often disassemble my scanner and use a cotton swab to clean the glass - although I should warn that this action will typically void any warrantee on the scanner, and might result in a broken scanner if not carefully handled (a professional might be better in those cases).

The biggest issue you will find with this utility is that it does not return specific data, but rather huge tables worth of data that you must sift thru in order to get the specific information you want.  Not an easy task in DOS.  Thankfully you can filter the data using the DOS FIND.EXE utility.  You will also find that the serial number is enclosed in a single quote, as in '773LL-GG5687', which obviously is not the serial number.  As DOS is a million years old, a million utilities do exist to handle string manipulations.  One such as XCHANGE.EXE found in Clay Ruth's "Clay's Utilities v1.2" can come in handy.

Once you have the tools, the process is relatively simple, requiring only to filter the BIOS information for the serial number lines, extract the serial number from the returned lines, clean up the serial number to remove any extra characters, and then store the results in an environmental variable.  The below script accomplishes this:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO IF "%%2"=="" GOTO END > SERIAL.BAT
ECHO SET SN=%%2 >> SERIAL.BAT
ECHO :END >> SERIAL.BAT
ECHO | SMBIOS2.EXE /G | FIND /I "Serial number" > SetSN.BAT
CALL XCHANGE.EXE SetSN.BAT "'" "" > nul
CALL SetSN.BAT
DEL SetSN.BAT
DEL SERIAL.BAT
ECHO %SN%

In a nutshell, the script filters the smbios2.exe output for just the serial number, strips all information from the returned lines except the actual serial number, and dumps it into the environmental variable SN.  From there, you can output the number to any other dynamically created file for use elsewhere.