I am part way through this process for the third time! I am 63 and have spen the biggest chunk of my life involved with photography. Before digital it was all film based so I have quite a large collection of mainly negatives and but some slides.

I said for the third time so I will detail the roads I went down and didn't pan out. I am not including flatbed scanners because when you are faced with literally thousands of negatives they are just not practical because the amount of remedial work is too much.

Dedicated Scanner.
Some years back I bought a dedicated negative slide scanner, it was a Pacific Image model and worked well. It produced high resolution images and the colour fidelity was pretty good. So why did I stop using it? Here are the 2 things that this whole process revolves around.
1. Scan time: this one took around 1 minute per scan.
2. Post scan remedial work (scratches, dust marks etc). The software (Silverfast) had a steep learning curve and even then left much to be done manually.
Conclusion: It was taking too long and there still too much manual intervention required.

5MP Cheap Flash Scanner
The scan time was mere seconds but the results were less than good most of the time. There was no post scan software supplied so that just left a lot of manual intervention.
Conclusion: Simply not practical for a thousand negs

20MP Flash Scanner
I waited a few years after the cheap flash scanner but never gave up the quest. When I saw the 20MP Wolverine on Amazon I took a punt and bought one. When comparing the results for the same negs with the cheaper 5MP scanner the results were obviously so much better on the 20MP model.

Software
I also came across AKVIS retoucher which really solved the post scan problem. It removes scratches and dust with minimal effort and really works. Simple, no steep learning curve and acceptable results.

Conclusion: These 2 together are a practical solution for what I am attempting.

Unless you are a professional photographer (in which case you would stump up $8000+ for a top notch scanner) what you really need is some process that is do-able for the number of slides/negs that you have. In my case of a thousand or so negs there are a handful that are really precious to me. For those really special ones you can send them to a lab to get scanned. You obviously would not be able to afford that for the bulk but it is horses for courses.

Finally. In looking over my the photos I have taken in my life so far I was really shocked to discover that there have been really important people in my life that I have either no photos or only one or two bad quality snaps. Record your friends and lovers while you can!

As it's my first I have nothing to compare it to except my Dell laptop. I am already in the habit of shutting apps down (2 clicks on the home button), to save battery. I have been using it for around 3-4 hours and it still shows 75%. Prior to this I'd be cooking my balls by now :-)