Friday, August 19, 2011

Grr.

Was going to do stuff, but I spent the last two hours fighting with the Eee PC trying to convince it that the slot in the side is not a cooling vent, but an SD Card reader.

It still won't budge on its opinion.

(It's running Windows 7... anybody have any idea what the deal is?)

4 comments:

James said...

As an interim solution, if you have a camera that takes SD cards (or any number of other devices - I've used my automotive Garmin, for instance) you can use it as a makeshift card reader.

Anyway, in your Start menu, right click on "Computer" and select manage. In the window that pops up, select "Device Manager" under System Tools on the left. If there's anything listed there with a little yellow triangle and exclamation mark symbol, one of them is probably your card reader. It might not be easy to figure out which one it is, because they're often listed under generic names.

One way to find drivers (if they're not to be found on ASUS's support site at support.asus.com) is to right click the device with the yellow triangle, select properties, and then in the window that pops up go to the "Details" tab. From there, select "Hardware Ids" from the drop down box. You'll see a list of gibberish, the important parts are the four numbers/letters after "VEN" and the four numbers/letters after "DEV". These identify the vendor (8086 is Intel, for example) and device that you're looking at. Plug those into Google like this: "VEN 8086 DEV 29B4" and see what it comes up with. It might not get you the driver, but you may be able to figure out the specific maker and model of your SD card reader, which you can then often use to get the driver from the OEM (rather than ASUS.)

Fred said...

That's part of the irritation... nothing has the little "trouble" mark, and there's nothing even resembling a card reader on the list.

The biggest problem is the little Casio armored camera uses the little micro-SD cards, and has a proprietary cable that nothing else uses (and disappeared when I lent the camera to somebody...), but I have a micro-to-SD adapter card, and it's a lot more convenient to carry around (fits in a little pouch inside the camera case.) Overall it's just the annoyance of having a card reader built-in so I don't have to drag extra crap around...

Thanks for the advice though.

Anonymous said...

go in to the bios setup and check that the card reader is active.
Sincerely stepinit

Fred said...

Of course last night it read the card just fine. I hate computers...