Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Nothing better than a half-gig hard drive for your Pocket PC
It's probably a little early in the CF card's lifespan to write this review, but I'll focus on potential uses rather than reliability.I basically bought the card for my HP Jornada 567 Pocket PC 2002. It already had 64 megs of memory, but I wanted more. I also already had a 256 MB card for my Nikon Coolpix 775, so this one was more for the handheld than anything else. My HP can playback MP3's directly off the CF card without modification, and with drag-and-drop functionality from my notebook's hard drive, which is nice. That way I can store around a hundred songs for music on the go, which I typically listen to in the car, using a cassette adapter through the HP's headphone jack. I also enjoy watching movies on the go, and with the downloadable Windows Media Encoder, I can reformat almost any movie file into .WMA format, and bring it with me. The card could conceivably store three full-length feature films at 192 x 144 resolution without much problem. It's also great for carrying large text documents with you wherever you go...like, say, your novel, technical manuals, the Bible, as well as a couple dozen songs, and still have room for a movie or two...amazing! I don't know how I got around without this baby. Another plus is that you will *never* run out of space while taking photos on vacation with your digital camera, even at the highest settings, unless you do field work for National Geographic. So far, this card has changed my definition for personal entertainment and functionality. Viking makes pretty good hardware, too. Just watch out for any rebates they offer (there was no offer on *this* card, but be careful). Now I'm just waiting for the Gigabyte card...
Rating:  - The first three months it worked great, then died!
I really wanted to give this unit a good review because I really liked having the 512 megs available. I've owned this card for the last 5 months and have been going back and forth with Viking to get it replaced. They are very efficient at giving a replacement but I have recieved defective replacement units twice so far and have been without it's use for almost two months. I paid twice what it is today which doesn't bother me (technology speed). The replacements have not accepted any data beyond 58 meg and then crashed, no matter which computer, which CF reader, My laptop or PDA, it doesn't work and now I am frustrated. All my 256 meg Sandisk, Mr Flash and Kingston work fine. If you want a reliable CF card I think you may want to look elsewhere.
Rating:  - Great tech support, partially defective product (s)
Summary: I had a great deal of trouble with a Viking 512 MB compact flash card, Viking was very helpful in replacing it with two 256 MB cards, but now the only 256 MB card I've used thus far has corrupted data as well. I give Viking tech support manager Patrick Beard 5 stars, he was very professional. However, the product quality rates only1 star. Average 3 stars. I did get my money back after shipping back the cards. Details: In early December, just before a big overseas family vacation, I purchased one Viking 512 MB card, and one SimpleTech 256 card. The Viking card was the first one I used, and there were no problems for one week. Then one photo I took showed as a very small image with the caption CF CARD ERROR. I had no idea what this meant at the time and in fact the camera/card seemed to repair that image one hour later. Several days later I noticed a couple of images that were previously fine and now show CF Card ERROR. I had already taken over 300 photos on this card at this point and was concerned enough to switch to the SimpleTech card and took 200 photos on that card for the rest of the trip. After coming back into the US, the Viking card would not upload the images into the computer. By the way the camera is G3 and the computer is high end new Dell running XP. The only method I finally got the images into the computer was using Windows explorer. Then I realized 60 images were missing. Viking was very helpful. I shipped them the defective card, and they shipped me two 256MB cards. It took them one week, but Viking also recovered 60 of the images that were missing for me. I estimate that I lost less than 10 images all together. However helpful Viking was, the card was defective, and the whole experience probably cost me 10 hours of time. Unfortunately, one of the 256 MB card has corrupted as well. The Simple card on the other hand, just worked. No Card ERROR, no problem in uploading into the computer, the way it should be. It has been 3 months.
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