Technical corner........

Ah, now I've had this problem before, in reverse. My Minolta also uses CF cards and a couple of times a card I've formatted on the PC isn't recognised by the camera.

Unhelpfully I've never yet managed to get to the bottom of it but I suspect that it's one or the other not being totally standards compliant in the format, though I have no idea which one is at fault... though I do have the urge to blame Bill Gates due to my overwhelming hatred of any software that bears the Windows name (a by-product of struggling with his crap since MS-DOS v3.3).

It's a PITA alright, this is why I transfer everything to a flash drive now at the earliest opportunity and never use memory cards for storing/transporting anything. Been bitten in the ass too many times now

Have you?:

Done a scheduled chkdsk in case there are any orphaned files?

Checked the hidden temp folder in C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Temp as well as the C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data folder (this folder can get especially large sometimes).

Have you checked the browser cache settings?

Have you set your swap file to be a fixed size instead of a temporary size that increases or decreases?

Alas I wish I could give step by step. I don't have any machines running Vista here, plus the fact I've steered well clear of Vista so I don't know the specific way to do things on it.

Hi can you tell me is it as easy as it looks when you try to download windows XP over windows vista?

is there anything I should watch out for?

Hi why are you gettin rid of XP or do you mean over writing XP with Vista???

Windows should take care of it all....but back up alll your files first...obviously....another option is to create a dual boot pc by just installing windows into another directory.....windows will auto matically create a boot menu so you can choose between XP or Vista ...am not sure but I think you have to put Vista in first .... have not tried it tho ....Peanut will probably be on later and put us both right .....Also a Memory stick is made using flash memory so thats where the names get muddled but essentially all the same ...

Cheers Gary xxx

To be honest I'm not sure installing over Vista would be successful unless you do as Gay suggested and go for a dual boot system

Although there are many similarities between XP and Vista there are enough differences to make for a lot of problems trying to share.

If he's not interested in keeping Vista on the machine (and TBH I can't see why he would be) then the best way would be to nuke the lot by formatting the drive during the XP install.

This would of course destroy all data on the drive prior to the install, so he would need to have all his data files backed up.

that sounds an easier option to have both vista and xp on then he can choose which to boot from, from what he saying he has seen it on the internet and you download from there, it just seemed too easy as I though you had to buy the xp program

If I'm reading this right and not confusing his technical knowledge with yours, if he thinks XP is a 'program' you download from the 'net I'd recommend he stick with Vista (shudder) because if he doesn't know what he's doing then he is most likely to wreck both operating systems and end up with an unusable computer.

If he does actually know what he's doing and is quite happy to download an operating system off the net for free then I'd recommend he go for Linux instead of XP. A Linux distribution like Ubuntu is totally free, very easy to install and is a perfect competitor for XP. Most of the desktop software for Linux is also free such as Gimp (an imaging software similar to Photoshop) OpenOffice (which is a similar thing to, and compatible with, Microsoft Office). There are all manner of other things too, all free including Firefox.