Yes, you can use any partially used cards on manual work station.-they are easy to retrieve off the manual review rack at any time. I would call your Ortho rep, to see if your software setting can be modified. Ours were and it helped immensely. There has been one software upgrade a few months ago, that is possibly what you/they were referring to. I was told all along the final software upgrade was coming out 4th quarter of this year. I have found Ortho has devli vered and been upfront on everything they have said and promised. We looked at other instruments, and this pales in comparison to the other gel instrument that has been out 2 years and still haven't fixed the periodic 15 minute downtime flush that occurs and locks you out of the instrument-now that is a REAL nuisance,- occurs if instrument isn't "fed" samples hourly ! Requires babystiing if you don't want it to happen! Getting STATs off in 28 +/- 1 minutes has been awesome, as well overall TAT in under 30 minutes.We are very happy,