Home > Consumer Reviews > SimpleTech FlashLink CompactFlash/SmartMedia Reader

Once you manage to properly install this device's drivers on XP it works like a charm. If you will be using this device on Windows XP, do yourself a favor and forget about the included CD-Rom. Go to the SimpleTech web site, follow the links on the site to get to the support pages for the FlashLink product and based on your device's Part number (found on the base of the unit), download the latest FlashLink.exe installation program. Install this before plugging the device for the first time and reboot.

After rebooting, plug in the reader and allow Windows XP to detect it and initiate the Driver installation routine. It will ask you whether you want to install the drivers automatically and after you click Next it will ask you whether you want to allow the installation of Unsigned drivers. Answer yes only if you have downloaded and installed the driver package from the web site, the drivers supplied on the CD-Rom do not work and cause XP to crash.

If you have already installed the CD-Rom drivers and have problems, you must first uninstall them before installing the ones from the Web Site. Open the Windows XP Device Manager, plug in your device, you'll see it appear under the USB Devices branch. Right click on the CompactFlash + SmartMedia reader device and click on Uninstall. Unplug the reader, uninstall the FlashLink software (if you installed it from the CD-Rom) and reboot. Then install the FlashLink software from their web site.

After this hurdle, the device works like a champ. Once plugged, it will show two new drive letters in Windows Explorer, the first for the CompactFlash slot and the second for the SmartMedia slot. Data transfer is really fast, at about 4MB per second.

I give it 4 starts because of the poor job of providing XP drivers in the supplied CD-Rom, despite the fact that the packaging clearly states that it supports XP.

The Digital Media Reader may work well with Windows 98,Me or 2000, but it failed miserably with XP. To add insult to injury when the SimpleTech web site was queried; mis-information was the best they could give.

During the hardware installation, the media reader(UCS-200) did not pass the Windows Logo Testing. I immediately aborted the process. I went to the Simpletech web site for advice. SimpleTech had a section just for XP and stated," just ignore Windows's warning and complete the setup process".

What a mistake I made, my operating system was degraded and became unstable. Until I'm able to recover from this misfortune, my computer shuts down whenever and frequent.

The news of bad and mis-leading service will spread exponentially from person to person. I hope that this is the exception and not the rule for SimpleTech.

Because of wrong information from the SimpleTech web site, I can not recommend a SimpleTech Product in the future.

I have a digital camera and it used to take so long just to get my pictures transferred to my computer. Since I got the FlashLink reader, I just slip my compact flash card out of the digital camera, plug it into my reader, and download... fast! Very cool!

Like some of them for this piece of [junk]. It's fabulous. It solved all of my problems. Next thing you know these fools will be trying to convince you that it'll eliminate world hunger. I bought one of these and used it maybe 5 times in about 2 months with my smartmedia card. After that it just stopped working. I know it was connected correctly because the drives continued to map to it, but when I inserted either card and tried to access the data on it I was given a message to insert a card. Avoid this product

This USB reader works great, but if you check the maufacturer's Website, you'll notice is Win XP compatible. It sure is, but not with the supplied CD --it doesn't even mention XP on the CD or anywhere in the supplied instructions. Make a quick visit to [website], to download the XP drivers. Suggestions --install the drivers FIRST, (you may get an XP error like I did stating it's not compatible, but it does work) then plug the USB cable into the USB port on your PC and everything should work fine!