You can trade time for money. There are several professional scanning services. For slides, you just send them your selects, of course. For negatives, they don't want you to cut the strips. One popular option is ScanCafe. They do all the cleanup and send you back nice, high-res scans, suitable for dumping into your favorite photo processing tool.

(I'm considering shelling out some big bucks and sending them my binders of b&w negatives from high school. Not cheap, but then I'd at least have all that old work accessible to me again.)