I appear to have lost the photo download wizard from my computer. In the past I have been able to download digital photos from my Olympus XD media card by inserting the card into the computer card reader. A green light started flashing on the card reader, and a download wizard appeared on screen allowing me to choose what to do with the card. Now, whenever the media card is inserted into the reader nothing happens and the only way I can download the photos is to open the H drive in My Computer and manually copy the files. How can I restore operation of the photo download wizard? The computer is running Windows XP SP2.

What you have encountered is the AutoRun and AutoPlay feature of Windows XP. When you insert a new disk (e.g. CD or DVD) or card (e.g. XD or CF) into the computer Windows scans the inserted storage device for any media, and then determines which is the most suitable operation to be conducted, given the media on the storage device. For example, if you insert a movie DVD into the DVD-ROM drive on the computer Windows will recognise that a DVD has been inserted containing a movie, and will produce the AutoPlay box asking what you would like to do with the DVD disc. Because it has detected that the DVD contains a movie, the default option will be to play a DVD using the default DVD media player on your computer. When you previously inserted an XD memory card into the computer Windows would recognise that the card contained photos and suggest that you open/download the files using the photo download application/wizard on the computer. It seems that the AutoPlay on the card reader drive has somehow become disabled, so we need to re-enable this feature. Open My Computer and right-click on your card reader drive (which appears to be the H drive) and select Properties. In the drive properties window that appears, click the “AutoPlay” tab. In the content type drop down box, select “Pictures”. Underneath the Actions window it is likely that at the moment “Select an action to perform” and “Take no action” are enabled, indicating that while Windows is detecting that there are pictures on the storage device, no action is being performed. So, to restore this to its default configuration, click the “Restore Defaults” button. Alternatively, if the “Restore Defaults” button is not enabled (i.e. is greyed out) then you will need to manually reconfigure the AutoPlay settings. This is a relatively easy process, where you just need to enable “Prompt me each time to choose an action”. Regardless of which method you used to restore the settings to their defaults, to save the settings click the “Apply” button and then OK. Insert an XD card into the memory card reader, and the photo download wizard should appear asking what you would like to do with the card.

If you find that you select the same action to perform every time the AutoPlay window appears, you could streamline the process even further and bypass the AutoRun window step to make that action occur automatically without any user intervention. To do this, go back into the AutoPlay properties for the card reader drive, and select “Select an action to perform” and then highlight the action you would always like to be performed when you insert an XD card (or any card containing pictures) into the drive (for example, open the photo download wizard). Once this has been done, click “Apply” and OK. Now, whenever you insert a card with pictures into that drive, the wizard will automatically run without any user intervention.