Hi Frank,>>But I did have to keep Win98SE on my other machine as I
found that the Reader for my digital camera wouldn't work on XP.<<
Is this a problem you had right away, or did it work at one time, then go south? I ask because I had a problem where it worked, then stopped. I found a registry entry that fixed it right up. I'm not sure if it'll work if it's a driver issue though. Does XP at least recognize the camera as a mass storage device (hard drive)? If it is, we might be able to get it working with XP.
You *really* want it to work with XP and I'll tell you why. Along with XP's strong points of stability and reliability, is how it handles digital multimedia. I'm not sure what camera you have, but of the three I've owned, they all handle the files the same way, and are named with some alphanumeric gibberish in order. So, if you copy the pics to a folder on your HD it's fine, until you copy a new set of pics that are named the exact same way. If you try, it'll ask to overwrite the old pics which of course you don't want to do. Of course the way around that is to manually rename the original set so they don't have the same filenames. You probably also want to give them a descriptive name, so when your looking at a folder of pics, you know roughly what they're about. On my Olympus 3040zoom I have a 128meg smart media card for storage that can hold 163 hires pics. I wouldn't be a happy camper having to rename 163 pics in one go!
This is where XP shines with digital cameras. If XP recognizes your mass storage device as a camera, it starts the "Scanner and Camera" wizard. In the dialogs that follow, it asks, "what would you like to call this group of pictures?" Let's say you have vacation pics, and you want to call them vacation2002. As you type "vacation2002", you'll see that XP is automatically creating a folder called "vacation2002" under your "pictures" folder, and as it copies the pictures, each one is numbered sequentially vacation2002 001.jpg, vacation2002 002,.jpg, etc. There's also a checkbox asking if you want to delete the pics after copying them. No later when you have more pics to transfer (and want to call them the same thing), XP picks up where it left off in the numbering order. The whole process is pretty slick and VERY easy. My camera came with software that roughly approximates this, but it was much more difficult to use and didn't create folders on the fly.
Give me a shout via email if you want to try the registry fix, to see if it works with your camera. Also, let me know what model of camera you have, and I'll try to dig up an alternate fix if the registry thing doesn't work.
--Greenie
**6 miles SSE KSJC**
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