A five-year-old digital camera, connected to a USB port on a Win2k Machine, just automatically comes up as an additional [hard/flash] drive, and the picture [.jpg] files can be copied using Windows drag and drop or copy/paste procedures, etc. No user-initiated driver installation of any sort is necessary. Whatever driver is needed comes with the OS and is installed automatically.
Not so with any of three digital cameras purchased this year. Drivers that work under Win2K aren't even available. To get the pictures from the camera using the USB port on the camera, it must be connected to a WinXP machine, it seems. Why are the camera manufacturers making it so hard? Is this part of DRM? I can still get the pictures transferred from the camera to a Win2K machine by removing the camera's "memory" card and putting it into a card reader that is attached by USB to the Win2K machine, so the camera manufacturers are merely inconveniencing me a bit, not really preventing me from doing it. The inconvenience is that the card reader is not connected "permanently" to the Win2K machine, so I have to fish it out of a drawer full of "stuff" when I want to use it. Also, the card reader comes up as four different drives, for the four different slots for different typed of cards on the card reader, and the extra drives shown but not being used in MY Computer are sort of nuisance/distraction. Fred Holmes ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
