The Bloog

Do a google seach on “itunes iphone vista problems” and you’ll have a good idea of how many people are having issues syncing their iPhone to iTunes in Vista. The kind of problems vary a lot, but one more so than the others: Vista detects iPhone just fine, as Apple iPhone, but iTunes knows nothing about it being connected to the computer.

Some of the suggested solutions are as follows:

- Try a high-powered USB port, one that is not on your keyboard or other device but rather directly on the computer itself.
- Uninstall Apple Software Update, Apple Mobile Device Support and iTunes , reboot and then reinstall iTunes.
- Disconnect any other USB devices that may be conflicting with the installation, like webcams and such and reinstall iTunes.

Many people reported having fixed the issues by simply reinstalling iTunes as described above, yet many others, including myself, still experience the same issues after reinstalling 20 times. So what to do? Well, that’s where it becomes blury for most and tricky therefore to fix it.

I concluded that the problems must arise from certain software of services that are running and preventing iTunes to install properly. To isolate this problem, you must disable any non-essential services and programs that run at startup. Do that by running ‘msconfig’ from the start menu (open Start menu, type msconfig and press enter).

I won’t go too in depth as to what you need to disable and what not, since services and software vary widely from computer to computer. Also, be aware that your computer may have problems loading Windows if you disable some service or software that you shouldn’t disable, so you’ve been warned.

On the services tab, check Hide all Microsoft services and then click Disable All. This will disable, theoretically, all services that are not essential to the running of Windows. Now go to the Startup tab and go through the list and disable by removing the checkmark from the entries that may not be required for a one time clean boot. Software like antivirus, cd-burning, acrobat, printer drivers, webcam drivers and software, etc. Once you’re done, click Ok, and reboot the computer.

I should specify again, that this step (of disabling services and startup items) should be done after you have uninstalled Apple Software Update, Apple Mobile Device Center and iTunes, thus allowing you to boot clean(er) and install iTunes without risking other software or drivers to interfere.

Assuming you booted clean as described above, install iTunes (latest version) and pray that it will detect your iPhone when you launch it. If it does, you’re good to go and now you just need to restore and enable the services and startup items that you previously disabled and reboot your PC. The msconfig utility has a column that shows when an entry was disabled so that will make very easy for you to know exactly which ones you disabled a few minutes ago. After restoring the services and startup items, assuming iTunes installed correctly and detected your iPhone when you booted clean, iTunes should no longer have trouble detecting the iPhone afterwards.

If iTunes still doesn’t detect your iPhone, well at least you tried. If you do find another fix, post a comment here and i will update this post. Good luck!