Lenovo IdeaCentre K220 Not Recognizing Flash Cards (Vista x64)

This post is way out of blog character for me, but I'm writing it in hopes it saves someone out there a few hours of frustration.

My family and I are preparing this evening for our Christmas vacation, which begins tomorrow morning with a plane ride. Naturally, there are not a few things to be done before we leave, and one of them is unloading the pictures currently existing on the camera memory cards to make way for the vast collection we'll be gathering in the next days. So, given that we had a fair amount to do this evening, naturally my computer decided to stop detecting the cards when they were inserted, essentially rendering the task of transferring the existing pictures impossible. Lovely. But have no fear, a reboot will surely fix it...or not. Poking around in the BIOS, device manager, drive manager...nothing. The machine simply had no awareness of those flash interfaces existing. So, this could only be one thing, a dreaded driver issue.

So now I'm slogging through the forums on Lenovo's site looking for poor, hapless people who have experienced this issue before. There seem to have been a few, but no easy remedy. It was also here that I discovered Lenovo's support is still far behind Dell. If only Dell hadn't given my mom of all people the runaround when her monitor failed less than a year after buying a Dell on my recommendation because "they'll answer any questions you have, no problem". This after selling her a really awful printer as part of the package...a printer so bad that I can only get it to work after inserting paper at a carefully measured, precise angle, then wiggling it a little, and then at just the right moment, leaning very close to the printer and whispering threats through clenched teeth. But Dell wouldn't help her get the printer working right, and then they had to send her three monitors (and I had to get involved to make that happen) before the third one finally worked for more than a few days. After all of this, an email to Michael Dell, and a phone call with someone I can only assume is in the "response management" division at Dell, I asked that they send a new printer to sooth some of the frustration we'd had with their company. They responded that they couldn't do that. I of course pointed out that they most certainly could, and that the more accurate word to use in this case would be "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't".

So now I own a Lenovo. It's a nice machine, and affordable. But after my experience tonight, grace be with you if you have a problem with it late at night and don't want to just fire an email into the ether, or get into an extended phone wait game, because what you'll be left with is the forum.

After reading a lot of posts (many commenting on the lack of easily accessible information on the site), I happened upon this one. It seemed a very outside shot, but I followed the link and downloaded the latest driver for Vista x64. After contemplating the question of "how bad could installing this be", and "when was the last time I checked my backups", I installed it. Peace on earth and goodwill to the folks at Ricoh, it worked. My wife just finished cleaning off the memory cards, and I made this post.

If anyone happens to find this helpful, well Merry Christmas!