Downloading photos to the computer

SteveMars

I seem to have followed the instructions I have come across, but my photos do not appear in Picasa, or for that matter any other file on my computer. I have used Picasa for seemingly forever, and really have no desire to move on to an any allegedly better program.
Yes, I do accept that I'm not too flashy with my computer skills, but usually I manage to eventually do what I have set out to achieve. This is very frustrating.
Any replies keep as simple as possible, something a 67 year old stroke survivor with degrees in Visual Arts (post stroke, yes he's a bit of a show off) Town Planning and Arts, who lives on the east coast of Tasmania should be able to handle.
Camera is a Nikon D3100 bought on ebay last month and still have not been able to download anything.
Please, step by amazingly obvious step.

bruto

I don't know anything about Picasa itself, but if you have had good luck using Picasa before, and if you are able to download files from the computer to Picasa, the easiest way to do this would be to get a card reader for your computer, and transfer the files from the card. When you use a USB card reader on the computer, it sees the card as a drive, and allows a wider range of familiar actions than when the computer connects to the camera itself.

I prefer to use a card reader anyway, because it makes it very easy to move a whole card full of material to the computer's hard drive, where files can be duplicated, and the new copies manipulated without any danger that the card will be corrupted.