It applies to any and all devices that you put into ports on your computer regardless of the operating system your computer is running. A memory card, a "thumb" drive, an external hard drive, or anything that plugs into a USB port or a memory reader port on a computer should only be removed after clicking the Safely Remove Hardware icon to stop any activity on the device. Otherwise you risk damaging the device or the port on the computer and losing information stored on the device.

DO NOT FORMAT unless you are ready to wipe the card of any data. Also, format the card only while in your camera, e.g., let your camera do the formatting. A number of camera makers do special formats bsead on their own system. Usually, it means it reserves some space at the beginning of the file to record settings and time/date (file header). The photo content, if recorded in a standard format such as jpg will be the same as any other jpg format written by other equipment. If you format a card in other equipment, it may not be recognized by your camera and will ask if you wish to format it. That may be waht happened at Walgreens: Your card had a special file structure that was not recognized by Walgreens equipment, i.e., it wasn't smart enough to search the file for the begining of the picture content, or the photo was recorded using a technique not recognized the the machine. For example, if the card was written by a Kodak camera using their pciture format, pcn, it may not have been recognizable by the Walgreen photo machine. What to do: Find out what types of media the Walgreen machine can accept (CD, USB thumb drive) and which photo formats it can read (jpg, tiff, raw, etc.) Transfer the photos from your camera to a computer files such as hard disk, data CD, USB thumb drive, etc., and then take a copy on a CD, USB drive, etc to Walgreens for printing. Again, do not format your data media in the Walgreens machine. Do all your formating back at home. One caution: If you format a card in the camera, make sure its cells are charged or use an external power supply if you have one. Running out of power while formatting is a bad thing.

Yep, all I do is pop it in and go but let me warn you, I have an Olympus camera that will not take anything larger than a 512mb card so make certain *before* you get to the wedding that A) it is the correct type of card for your camera B) that your camera will accept the 2G size. But over and above everything else, have a great time at the wedding (which of course would be difficult if your camera won't take pictures.) Jodi-

When you remove a memory card from a camera and put it into a reader, be very careful not to perform any operation that 'writes back' to the card. For example, you may have opened an image into photoshop or MicroSoft's photo viewer and made some minor adjustments. When you went to delete the image, the software asks, "Do you want to save?" If you answer, "Yes", the image gets written back to the card and this may spoil its propertiary format. When this happens, the only solution is to re-format the card and loose all images on it. You may have to, with the card in the camera, delete all images before it will re-format. If the card is so messed up that the camera's software will not touch it, try this: Put the card in the external card reader and delete all images, then see if the camera will re-format the card. Make sure there are no files ledt on the card set to 'read only'. Scrapeing the gold plated contacts is not recommended for two reason: Typical gold plating for this kind of application is about 5 microms thick. Any thinner, and you would be able to see through the plating. Scratching it rubs through the plating and may carry embedded comtaminants to the contacts in the camera. The secomd problem is static discharge. Minute static charges impressed on the contacts can ruin the card. The best policy is do not touch the contacts. By the way, I also use an external card reader to extract images from the card. I copy the images to a hard drive or other storage device and for the lack of a better term, call these my master copies. I do all my editing on copies from the 'master file', keeping the master copy intact and never witting back to it. Thus, if my edit gets messed up, I merely get another copy and play with it. You may want to consider setting the master copy to 'read only'.