Friday 2 April 2010

Dell Teac CA-200 card reader drive icons in Windows 7

My Dell Vostro 200 came with a TEAC 13-in-1 memory card reader (not the one with the Bluetooth option). Since I upgraded to 64-bit Windows 7 I've not had the drive icons that were on Vista previously. There's no official driver support at the Dell site for Vostro 200 or the card reader and this OS.

Its not a biggy and certainly doesn't stop anything working but rather than having several generic drive icons which look the same as flash drives when connected (I'm easily confused) - I'd rather have the old TEAC drive icons that showed exactly which memory type was on which drive:
They also greyed out when not in use, so you can see at a glance what's loaded, which is a nice touch.

I found a some articles that put me on the right track, but involved quite a bit of registry work to fix, e.g.
http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/262307-need-help-missing-flash-drive-icons-file-open-save-dialog-box-2.html

Here's the easier option - you need to download the Vista 64 bit driver for TEAC CA-200. I found it on the Dell support site here (its download R176598 - same as R175675)
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R176598&formatcnt=0&libid=0&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=240261

Run the download and it will unpack into C:\Dell\Drivers\R176598, auto-run and fail with a waning about incompatible Windows. Now if you go look in that directory you'll find a file called IMGR64B.EXE, right-click on it and choose Properties then Compatibility (you may need to click Change settings for all users).

Tick the 'Run this program in compatibility mode' and choose Windows Vista SP2 then tick the 'Run this program as an administrator' at the bottom. Click OK and run the program. It will install successfully this time. Make sure you give it plenty of time to finish as it will remove the current drive letters and reinstall them - takes a few minutes and it may not appear to be doing much at the time.

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