So, I’ve been struggling with getting my laptop (a custom Dell Inspiron 9400) to read my new SDHC card that I picked up for my camera. It’s nothing fancy: just a 4GB SanDisk card. During my fitful attempts and multiple reboots, I seemed to recall a friend having the same issue with her computer reading her new card as well. I thought that surely since she was using an older reader and I had a fairly new integrated reader that I wouldn’t run into the same issue. After spending a good bit of time researching and looking for firmware updates for my reader, I began to get hints that it may not be the reader itself at all, but rather it was good ol’ Microsoft Windows XP Pro rearing it’s incompatibility head again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of MS, and I don’t know what I would do without them, but when my system doesn’t support what seems to be a common thing, I get a bit testy. Thankfully, though, this story has an ending — and a solution — that was both complete and easy. If you follow this link, you will find a Microsoft hotfix just waiting to be installed. Apparently, typical card readers simply care about the physical size of the card and rely on the OS to interpret the file structure and formatting of the data, so I suppose it makes sense that the OS has to be upgraded in order to read the larger cards.

Hope this fix will help a few others out there as well!