Cheap SD cards

Are not worth it...Took an 8gb card out of my camera last night and it disintegrated. I have just managed, after several hours of fiddling, to jam the bits in my old laptop's card reader and it says it's going to take 2 hours 18 minutes to download 398 pics, some of which are of thunderstorms at night I managed to capture last night, along with shots of Hong Kong and some of Doha. I just hope it works. I think I will stick to known brands from now on......

Good luck with the salvage John...

Thanks i-Berg, it took two and a half hours, but managed to download all the pics to my old laptop, which then crashed! Sorted now though, thankfully. I had better go buy a new card.....

And the new laptop to go with it?

I needed a new laptop anyway, I kept getting Crash Dump messages with a blue screen, and it was taking ages to start up. I've totally wiped it now and will give it to my son.

I have just got a 64 bit machine with 8gb of DDRAM and a dedicated graphics card which I picked up in Hong Kong.