Thanks for the replies, in the end I gave up and brought another one, which works fine. When I plugged the old one in to the old usb or different one, it still did not work. Neither this one or the last one came with any software, as windows recognises it on its own, bit it is still a myster why this keeps happening every 6/9 months or so! I am not very tenchnically mindied, but will get a friend to look at it. Thanks once again.
