WMP 11 doesn't like Ricoh card reader

Hi,

I've just been killing myself trying to get Windows Media Player 11 to work on my Asus W5A notebook. It would install fine, but as soon as WMP opens it would crash with an unhelpful error.

I've tracked this down to being a problem with the in-built Ricoh card reader. Apparantly what causes it is that WMP tries to get the manufacturer's name from the device but cannot find it, even with a card installed.

I disabled the Ricoh reader in Device Manager, and WMP runs without complaint. Re-enabling the device instantly causes WMP to crash and throw an error.

My Ricoh reader driver version is showing as 5.1.2535.0 and dated 1/07/2001.

Does anyone know where I might find a newer driver? There wasn't any driver at all available on the Asus website for the reader. Surely there must be a newer one out there now, and I think many laptops might use this same reader.

Thanks!

 

If you can't then my suggestion is to use something other than WMP - most programs that replaced it on XP are still capable of running fine on Vista. WMP11 is a huge resource hog and it lags a ton, it's bloatware really and it doesn't even support overlays. If I were you I wouldn't worry about the driver, at least for now and use some other program instead - it'll take awhile for drivers to catch up with Vista and give the same speed/support as XP...

Cat

 

Windows Media player is a decent program, not the best but not the worst.

In my opinion some of the best programs to use for media are:

Winamp for Music

VLC for Videos

Media Player Classics for Videos.

I use Windows Media player when i quickly want to check out Samples of movies, and or streaming movies/clips off the net. Other than WMP is a little annoying when it comes to playing movies and music, and takes up little more resources than i like.

 

I think wmp 11 is going to recruit a lot of people back to wmp.

I love it and I hated the earlier versions.

 

Actually I usually use Media Player Classic for my videos, but have been using WMP for audio still. I used to use Winamp a long while back when it was a nice simple, tiny app but then some new version came out that was buggy and convoluted so I stopped. Perhaps time to take another look.

Anyway the reason I and others may need to specifically run WMP11 is that many MP3 players need it in order to connect to and manage the device. I just bought an iriver Clix, which is an awesome little thing.. but uses MTP only. Although I could send files to it with WMP10, I wasn't able to browse the device in Windows Explorer and functionality was limited.

Anyway, I don't use the built-in card reader much so I've just disabled it until I need it. But it would be nice to see if there are any updated drivers out there somewhere so that I don't need to do this.

thanks