Thank you for this. I also wanted a good explication regarding why it shows up on small apertures and not on wide.

My guess is that your sensor needs more then just the blower. I had same problem myself. First time, i took it to the shop and they gave it a good swab and it was clean again.

After this i brought myself a cleaning kit with swab, and after lots of reading about doing it yourself, I took a deep breath and careful did it myself the second time.

In Norway they charge us about 100€ for a swab sensor cleaning. To buy the swab and the eclipse solution over 100€. I brought my kit with eclipse, swab, and a set of pec pads from ebay, US, for 6 or 8$.

Now I am a little more careful when changing lenses, but I also feel comfortable to do it myself.

Wow , I am impressed , they look so cool.
Well done

@blackest : I totally agree with you. I believe your response to me may be related to the little grudge I have to Seagate brand. But I totally agree with you when it comes to consumer harddrives, they will fail.

It has to be said that Seagate was a worthy brand back in the 90. Back then we were not used to have such amount of storage at home, and especially have them 24x7. As capacity increased , and "we" evolved to use our home computers for a whole lot more, we also started to treat our drives like the enterprise solution. 24x7. And that's how we started to see why server drives cost 2 or three times more. Cause they are built for it.
I've been testing SAN and NAS storages for our datacenter both cheap and more complex and expensive. No matter what, the systems were redundant so they were up and running. But the fault rate was much higher on the cheaper solution.

So here is a fine balance between what you invest in and the expectation you have. Consumer drives will fail more often period.

You benefit of the performance and redundancy just cause you went on from the single drive solution. No argue here, surely you have better performance on your dual disk NAS RAID1, then my 4 drives RAID5. But as soon as i invest in bigger drives 4TB up, i will go for RAID10. For now i prefer RAID 5, cause of optimal space. I don't see any problem in slow ARRAY rebuilding. So what degraded speed until finished. The key point here, as you also mentioned is redundancy. And this is where all consumer users should turn their attention to.

A lot of users could spared themselves the headaches if they stopped using single drive storage.

Unless you are using Seagates drives, i would not say NEVER :) My experience with Seagate is that they are not like they were back in the 90's.

At least you went on and got into NAS. I posted one answer earlier in another post, where I've stated, using single drives is old style now and false assurance. If you want performance and more secure drives systems, then nothing beats NAS or SAN storage. Two drive systems are ok, but more convenient with 3 and up.

People have to think about that if a drive supports transfer rates up 90MB/s and even up, then you need a system which can handle that transfer rate. USB 2.0 has 30% overhead , meaning transfer rate is slower then should be. Theoretically it should handle 52MB /s , but most systems today are not able to transfer more than 30-40MB /s. Then it comes to USB 3.0. Of course here is a lot higher, but has to be used with correct drives to achieve that high speed.
Another aspect of NAS storage system, is that combining harddrives in a raid system, you will be able to increase your transfer rate. Depending on type of configuration.

I am using a NAS storage myself, and started to use pretty much since they were affordable. Since, I have never considered using single drives for storage. My system disk is a single drive. I don't care. I have my windows backup on my NAS. All my data is on the NAS.
Single drives attached to USB It cannot compete on transfer rate, backup solution, expanding, and recovery possibilities. I've spared myself a lot of recovery time, and other time consuming task during the years after taken in use and that is why I encourage people to invest in one.

I stopp here, but I could go on for hours on this subject. There are some other protocols on NAS storage systems which can be used and make even more safer and redundant systems, but that's not stuff for everybody.

At the office we have a say :
PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
I've been upgrading to W10 for a while, on private basis and customers. All problems are small minor problems related to drivers. People still believe in Plug-And-Pray, and it works, but let's be honest, some things has to be done manually. And thats where users fail.

Kudos to Nikon_Jon : "if it ain't broken,don't fix" and this should be rule nr.1 for everybody on MS system with little knowledge on how to perform technical tasks as driver updates, partitioning, bios settings.

I believe you need to expand your System Reserved partition. Until W10 it was enough with 100MB Reserved system partition. From Windows 10 I believe it requires at least 350MB. If you do not feel comfortable with such task ,i would suggest, go for a clean install (backup your files) or get someone to do it for you. Lots of program out there , free, and easy to use.

I must apologize for not giving help on partitioning.I do not give such help anymore, as I've been accused of giving wrong information and lost files and archives. Some tasks are not meant for everybody. Period.

Hi Wall,

The hardware driver check it can be done through Computer Management. On windows 10 you can right-click the start button and you have access to Computer management.
When CM open, look on the left side of the window and you'll find Device Manager. Click on it and on the right side you will see a list over all your hardware. If you have hardware without drivers, it should be on top with question mark. From here you have to decide what drivers.

And here comes what I consider the hard part for you.
Sometimes the hardware without correct drivers can have a name or description that is not easy to understand. Depending on computer. In my case, this laptop, It was clear enough for me what i was missing, but I have to mention that my profession is IT, so what's clear for me, can be hard for others.

If you have a laptop, you may want to check the brand page and look for Storage drivers , since SD card drivers are found on Storage category. You also must make sure you Chipset drivers also are installed. Basically this applies to both laptops and workstations.

For now , it is very hard for me to give you more details. Maybe if you look at the Computer Management and the device drivers , and show me a screen dump of it , I may be able to help you further. What brand is your computer by the way?

One concern I have on your subject , is this XP you mentioned so much. Did you upgrade from XP? Does not sound correct. If this is and oooooold computer, which was designed for XP , you may have obsolete hardware also, which means you may be forced to upgrade. I really hope not. But anyhow, if this XP subject is not an issue , then I am positive you have a driver issue you need to solve in order to make your SD card. I can also mentioned , that this laptop I had the issue with, was installed back in July just as windows 10 was ready. Mine was a clean installed, BUT never took the time to check if all drivers were correct. The computer was working fine, and it's my working laptop. Until a couple of days ago, I did not even used the SD card on this laptop. That's how I found out. Mostly coz I use my bigger workstation at home for PP pictures. And here my computer was 100% upgraded and working 100%. Thats why I did not bother to check my drivers on my laptop.

ok, so I have a little update on this subject since I just experienced something almost exactly the same.
Windows 10, pain installed, upon inserting the SD card the drive is saying Secure Digital Card, with a fancy logo, but nothing on it.

Since I just came from a photo session with the kids and the card works perfect on my camera i took a closer look.

First of all , this computer needed driver updates. Chipset and SD card module driver for windows 10 were available so I installed them. After a reboot it worked flawless.

If you did not solve it yet I hope this will.
Good luck ¨

C.

To install a font in Windows, right click on the font file , and pick : Install

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
So true, maybe i should check that camera a little more often, who knows what modifications she's making for shooting

I am looking forward to the day my experience is as good as yours so i can shot once and be done, but I belong to the mortal ones for now, and practice gets results. And often a picture is saved just because you took that extra one. It must be said, i shoot less then before simply cause of practice and getting better. So I would not discourage anyone to shoot some extra shots. what's to loose?

Over the last couple of years I learned to shoot more than one shot. One common question I always get, is how come I am so lucky to grab those wonderful moments, but not them. Even we basically took the same picture at the same time.
Answer very easy :
- They shoot one time
- I take something between 5-10 picture. Depends on what the subject is and how difficult is to achieve what I want. Also, I started to become a lot more aware the fact that the lcd screen on the camera can fool you to think it's perfect if you do not take the time to zoom as much as possible to see the actual result.

One example I have is photographing my kids. One click does not cut it. Just the last weekend I was at the swimming pool with them, and came back with 300 pictures, after just 4 hours, where I kept like maybe 20.
My Ex- has also started to get better results just from listening to my advice and try to burst a couple of shots instead of just one.

So I would not even think about anything else then, shoot more than less :)

Thanx all once again for taking time and reading this story.

The even more sad part is that today i Just read about a turist who fell down from from the tip of the tounge.:( Group of 30 where, and somehow , one manage to fall down. The group had to go back pretty far back before they could inform the authorities, because of the coverage.
Only today, this morning they started to go for the drop where the poor soul fell.

May she (just found out, 20 year old) rest in peace.
Condolences to family.

I totally agree with you Kuzano.
By design it's impossible to just upgrade from XP.

It's funny how in every "win help" need, has to be someone trashing the MS platform in general. Still hoping Wall can give a little more description of his problem. For me that was a little blur to give a straight answer.