My Acer Apire 3620 won't read 4gb SD cards?

I have an Aspire 3620 (running XP home edition) with an Acer 5-in-1 PCMCIA card reader. It has worked fine with cards up to 512mb, but I got a new digital camera with a 4gb SD card and it will not recognize it. Says card "not formatted" , "do you want to format?" Any suggestions on getting it to recognize this card? Thanks.

 

If the 4GB card is brand new, you might need to hit 'yes' and format it. Then try.

If a device is not formatted, it has no file system hence the computer cannot use it. Formatting will get the file system started.

 

Make sure it is not an SDHC card, which is a different standard than SD cards.

 

Thanks for the fast responses! It is a Transcend 4gb 150x SD card. I don't think it is SDHC (what is that?). Anyway, when I put it in the reader it says needs to format. If I say yes, it goes to another window saying the card size is "981mb" and format type "fat32". I know the card is larger than that.

 

I know this issue happens with some card readers which either will not recognize the newer larger memory cards or they will report a lower amount of memory on the card, i.e they will only report as much memory as they were designed for the max they can handle. You could try checking acer euro site to see if you are running the latest driver for the card reader in your notebook. If that doesn't do the trick then perhaps you should try an external USB reader.

 

Thanks for the advice. In the meantime I will just go directly from the camera to the laptop via usb cable to move the pics from the camera.