Windows 7: windows corrupting my memory cards!!

hi guys!
never had this problem before on any computer running windows 7 but this new laptop i have (hp g6 core i5) seems to be continually corrupting memory cards out of my camera! when i first insert the memory card and view the pictures and go to change their orientation; windows comes up with a message saying it can't change it because the picture is no longer there! when you go back to view the folders on the card they appear as symbols as they have been corrupted! the first time it happened i downloaded (and purchased the key) for remorecover which seems to do a good job of recovering the images. its really annoying me as to why it is happening!
i'm now very careful and transfer images from the sd to the laptop straight away and safely remove the card afterwards. the laptop also corrupted a different memory card when the lid was shut and re-opened but im assuming this is because the computer was hibernating without the card being safely removed.
has anybody else had this problem and if so how can it be sorted?
hope somebody can shed light on the situation!
cheeeers!

Generally it has always been the case that you do not want to erase or format a cameras SD/CF card on WIndows, always let the camera do it.

However I have never seen this happen

Which camera/model was it? Though the formatting is probably still FAT32, there are parameters (like cluster sizes) that other OSes (linux) can set and use that windows will have problems with. Course if that's the case that's petty poor testing on the manufacturer's part. But also, maybe it's actually the card readers fault. Have you tried it in an external USB reader? (Or a different one)

I think you found your one solution (and really it's something I always do having taken thousands and thousands of photos on a dozen digital cameras over the years) ALWAYS copy the data to a safe place before doing ANYTHING

yeah i've heard that about camera's not liking you editing things on windows.
i have owned this camera (samsung st600) for about a year now and taken thousands of pictures and viewed them on other laptops/computers running different OS's with no problems (i have never even been dedicated to safely removing the SD cards either - still with no problems!)

i have used the microSD's in a SD card converter in the machines card reader and also in a usb converter and still they get corrupted! so not sure if it is the actual machines card reader at fault.
i'm just worried that it's also going to happen to the 1TB external hard drive that contains thousands of valuable pictures.

Likely not as those are NTFS drives usually. The camera formatted fat32 cards are the worst (potentially) for being easily corrupted.

And I would /definately/ get in the habit of using the safely remove drive icon... Windows (NTFS) is amazingly good about handling drive pulls from USB but it's not perfect. Do it 50 times and once you will lose the file. On a FAT32 system (most all cards of any type) you may lose an entire folder of files. Bottom line, if you ever write anything to a drive/card, always properly eject it.

Though the extent of the damage and the ease of causing it should NOT be normal for a windows install :/ which is why I was trying to pin it down to a single card slot or media from a single device like the camera.

Are you saying that using two different card readers and using cards from more than just the camera all do the same thing?

it has only been the cards out the camera that i have had trouble with (not tried cards belonging to other devices) but yes the cards were both inserted using different ports (usb and SD reader) and still did the same thing.
i have just tried formatting the corrupt card to NTFS on this computer but it couldn't complete it however the format was successful on a different laptop running the same os :/

Heh the camera won't read the NTFS card of course.

I had a camera some time ago where if you made the mistake of formatting the card in windows, the camera would never see it again, not even to the point that you could use the camera to reformat it. The card became instantly useless. So bugs like that do happen in shipping cameras.

I guess I should also ask, is it just ONE card? They can go bad after some time...

whats the best format for camera's then? im not fully clued up on all this haha it is two different memory cards, one is a few years old and has seen thousands upon thousands of pictures so maybe they are both a bit passed their sell by date?

99% of all cameras (maybe more) use FAT32. A newer version called exFAT may be on more cameras in the future, but for now it's all FAT32.