USB card reader works in XP not in vista?

[james]

I have a SDHC usb card reader like this:

http://www.meritline.com/card-reader-high-speed-black---p-18762.aspx

It works fine under win XP, but in vista, it's flaky. The LED won't turn off
when I "safely remove" it. Sometimes it froze when reading or writing.

What could be the problem?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, James.

I'm not familiar with that reader, but you might avoid the problem this way:

Go to Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc - you'll need Administrator credentials,
of course). With that USB card reader plugged in, right-click on it in the
left column of the Graphical View in the lower part of the screen, then
choose Properties. On the Policies tab, make sure to choose (Optimize for)
Quick removal, rather than Better performance. This will cause Vista to
always write data directly to the device, rather than cache the writes, so
there will never be a not-yet-written packet in the cache and the device can
be unplugged at any time without loss of data. You'll never have to wait
for the "safely remove" signal.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 7000