Friday, July 27, 2012

How to fix a non-working SD card slot in a Dell Latitude E6510

Well, I didn't find the fix myself - I stumbled on it.  The slot stopped working at some point, and I shipped the laptop 4 times back to Dell, and they replaced every link on the hardware chain - slot itself, port interface card, connecting cable, and the main board - to no avail.  I was mighty frustrated, as you can imagine.

Today I was removing the Control Point software from Dell, as this thing tended to spin out of control and eat up all CPU cycles lately.  I have no use for it anyway.  During the uninstall process, a driver message popped up: "Ricoh SD Reader installed" (may not be the exact wording) - that's my long lost SD slot!  WTF?  It felt as if the Control Point somehow suppressed the driver/device, and with its removal, the long ignored function came back.  In any case, thank goodness for it!

During the painful troubleshooting with Dell, out of more than 5 technicians/support engineers, not one even mentioned anything related to the Control Point.  Go figure...

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