palerider wrote:
sleepinglass wrote:
Arcangle,why would someone lock or unlock the card?
I never touch it and I am wondering if I should be??
I believe he's referring to something else.
however, some people need to lock their cards before putting them in their computers, some OS's, like winblows 8.1 (?) likes to helpfully write things on the card for it's purposes, that resmed s9 machines DON'T LIKE... and will say that the card is corrupted, and want to reformat it when you pop it back in. locking the card before putting in the computer prevents winblows from messing with it.
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Bingo!
Some bad operating systems will write data to the card without asking and the S9 machine will barf when it sees the extra data. Win 8.1 (I think) has been reported to do this. Some people have reported that some Macs do this as well. Viruses sometimes will write to the card and mess it up. There are some "helpful" programs like music players that scan through a card when you put it in the SD slot to look for some sort of file it needs to do something with and they might decide to "helpfully" put some sort of file on the card to keep track of things. User stupidity can mess the card up, too.
Luckily, I'm not using Windows 8. I never lock the card, or even bother to "safely remove." In theory, you don't need to safely remove unless you write data to the card.
I almost always copy the entire card to a directory when I stick it into the machine, so even if the card gets damaged, I haven't lost much. I'm also not fighting an insurance company over compliance records.
As to whether you should, your call. Consider what harm it would do if you accidentally damaged the card. Do you save the data to your PC? Would it hurt you to lose all the data on the card since the last time you downloaded and saved the data. Your PRS1 machine is also a lot less likely to get snotty and reject the card because the PC put a file on it.
BTW, curse you, ResMed for making the machines so fragile in terms of data on the card. This is probably going to make it impossible to use one of these WiFi cards even if they get it to work on PRS1 machines.