Home > Consumer Reviews > Dazzle DM22000 Hi-Speed Universal 8 in 1 Digital Media Reader/Writer

This is a horrible product that you should avoid at all costs! I have wasted a great deal of time trying to get it to work properly. Its drivers run in the Windows 16bit emulator (they didnt even bother to write 32 bit drivers for it for w2k or XP)
So when it crashes (which is frequent) the 16 bit emulator takes all of the cpu time! Then the stuff wont un-install, so you have to figure out where it is running in the registry and remove it by hand! One of the WORST products that we have ever bought here!

This product works well when it works, but all too often it does not work. The Win2k driver, even when installed carefully, often fails to recognise media. I am a computer professional, and I tried various tactics; I can now make it work, but it is complicated, fiddly, and ridiculous. Phone and email support are useless (gave up after 45 minutes on hold on the phone, even when email questions are accepted and acknowledged no reply ever arrives). Avoid this product.

Have had massive problems with two of these readers that I bought for work. One of them repeatedly disappears from my computer after I read and remove a card, and I have to reboot to bring it back. The other has somehow corrupted two Smartmedia cards and made them unusable. Zio supposedly has a firmware upgrade but so far has not actually sent it, nor is it available on their website, not to mention they said you can only install it with a Win98 system... Avoid this product, by all means.

Use of this product has resulted in the unusability of my two smart media cards in the past 24 hours. The company's FAQ page in their tech support page states that this is due to old firm ware. I cannot find a solution to this problem online.

I bought this reader a number of months ago because it was cheap and portable. I have never been able to get it working consistently on my Windows 2000 system. When I insert a memory card of any type, Windows 2000 tells me I have improperly removed a USB device from the system and the drive icons disapper in Windows Explorer. To get the reader working, I have to stop the USB device manually, then hope the system "refinds" it and adds the drives to Windows Explorer. When the reader IS found by the system, no problems, but getting there is a headache! At worst, the drivers send the UMONIT.EXE (USB monitoring) process pegging at 99% CPU usage and my system is unusable until I manually stop it. I have especially had trouble getting it to work with SanDisk OEM SD memory cards.

I have reinstalled the drivers and hardware more times than I can count, to no avail. I contacted technical support months ago and they sent me down a couple of silly paths that weren't helpful. I now see that the Dazzle website no longer has information for this product. Their knowledgebase only points to Pinnacle's website...

I can't vouch for performance with other Windows OS's, but if you have Windows 2k, BEWARE!!