Mem card unreadable on HP Pavilion

[Bill Wilson]

A friend has a Canon PowerShot and he's been unable to get the 6-in-1 mem card reader in his HP Pavilion to recognize the card, so of course he can't upload any of the pics he's taken.

He's running WinXP Home on the HP, a P4 with 512MB.

Is this a reader problem? A PC problem? An XP problem? A card problem? Any thoughts I can pass along? (He's new to digital photography, and his choices for testing the card and the 'puter are limited at best.)

[George Riehm]

A friend has a Canon PowerShot and he's been unable to get the 6-in-1 mem card reader in his HP Pavilion to recognize the card, so of course he can't upload any of the pics he's taken.

He's running WinXP Home on the HP, a P4 with 512MB.

Is this a reader problem? A PC problem? An XP problem? A card problem? Any thoughts I can pass along? (He's new to digital photography, and his choices for testing the card and the 'puter are limited at best.)

1. Has he tried to use this reader before? If so, and it worked, it's probably not the reader. If not go to step 2.

2. Do the individual removeable drive icons (there should be 4 of them or so) show up in My Computer? If not he probably needs to reinstal the card reader driver (probably already on the hard drive). If so then step 3.

3. If you plug in the camera via the USB cable, with the memory card installed, can you download through the USB connection? If so, it's probably not the memory card.

That's it for me. I have had problems installing multi-card readers in XP Pro, as I always expect it to be automatic, but some readers need an XP driver installed. It's still not totally plug-n-play.