The installation of this device is pretty straightforward. You put it in the 3.5″ bay, and plug it in to the motherboard USB pins. The USB pin-set on the motherboard looks like this:

All you gotta do is plug it in to the one with the missing pin, and you’re good to go. Windows XP will automagically detect the card reader, but if you want the sweet icons, you’ve gotta pop in that CD and go through the install. Also, I’d suggest you give it a test-go before you screw it in, just to make sure that it works correctly. Unfortunately, the first one of these that I got was faulty. It worked, but very slowly, and it corrupted most of the stuff that I put on it. I was extremely disappointed, because I screwed it all in and put the case sides back on, just to find that it worked shoddily. I don’t know if this is a common problem or not, but I returned my defective one, got another, installed it, and it works wonderfully. I wasn’t too surprised that I got a defective one, seeing as though it IS Dynex brand. The only reason I picked out Dynex in the first place was because 1) it’s cheap and 2) this was the only one they had at Best Buy that slipped into the 3.5″ drive bay, so I didn’t have the option of picking out another brand, and I needed it fast because I wanted to play with my Memory Stick Pro Duo ASAP. I’m just happy that they’re not all defective.

The functionality of this unit is, believe it or not, pretty good (as long as it’s not defective). The drive reads and writes to the cards pretty quickly, and it’s really easy to use. My only complaint with the functionality of the card reader is that it’s hard to get SD cards into it. In the process of trying to fit mine into the SD slot, the card got a little chewed up. It was nothing that would render the SD card useless, but you can definitely tell the card’s not new anymore. I wouldn’t decide against purchasing it just because of that, though, ’cause it reads and writes the card perfectly. All other cards seem to fit just fine, so if you’re not worried about your SD card getting a little scuffed, then it’s all good.

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