Today I tried to access images on an SDCard using the inbuilt card-reader on my W7 Home Premium Packard Bell EasyNote TE11HC.
The usual noise occurred but nowhere could I find the icon for the SDCard - so I was unable to open the files on the card. I tried a different SDCard (the first one was a new one first used in the camera today) but the same no-access was the result.
After ruminating over this 'failure' I decided to check the restore feature which revealed a Windows Update on 1st August (which must have happened automatically - despite my settings to only update at my say so - as I don't recall approving the update). Don't you just hate Microshaft?
Anyway, SDCard access is now restored after rolling back to before the update and I can, once again. use the card reader.
What can I do to prevent this happening again? I suppose I can set it to never ever install M$ updates, but is there anything that I could have done to install fresh drivers for the card reader?
There was no evidence of a problem when I ran the diagnostics - it didn't detect any hardware change.
PS the same loss of card reader happened on my previous laptop - which I put down as a hardware fault and bought a USB plug-in card reader (which worked just fine). Could I recover direct access to SDCards on that laptop?