Monday, May 21, 2007
Windows Mobile Device Center Poked Me In The Eye
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
It is amazing to me how the synchronization experience continues to get worse as time goes by. As slow as it was, some of the most reliable syncronizations were via serial cables with Windows CE Services 2.x back in the late 90's. Now everything is so fast and simple with USB. :roll:
Last week I sat down at my month old brand new freshly formatted Vista Ultimate laptop to do my weekly ritual of synchronizing my documents and make a copy of everything on my SD card. I had set the partnership up the day after loading the OS, and after a few reboots, soft resets and some WMDC automatic updates, everything was working fine. Then last week, I docked the device and got an error in WMDC. I unplugged my device and plugged it back in. It started to sync and I thought all was ok. However, I soon realized that my partnership had been renamed. It now said "Ed's Smartphone" instead of HansWizard. WMDC proceeded to then rename my sync folder on my PC from "Documents on HansWizard" to "Documents on Ed's Smartphone." This was especially useful to me now as applications like ListPro, eWallet and HanDBase no longer knew where to find the files. :evil: This turned out to be not much of a problem though, as WMDC also decided to delete about 90% of my files from both the PC and device, so there were really no files to be found. :bad-words: It was that same feeling when you get poked in the eye. It hurts, you aren't sure exactly what happened and you can't quite regain your senses fast enough. You are just stunned.
Fortunately, I had backed up my machine to a USB drive recently, so I got my files back as they existed on my PC, but a weeks worth of work on the device was now gone. Thankfully, no new userIDs and passwords had been added to eWallet on my device, but I still lost some info in ListPro, PocketBible and a few other apps.
Preparing for the worst, today I made a copy of the My Documents folder on the device before starting the sync routine. I am happy to report it wasn't necessary. WMDC refused to connect at all. No amount of rebooting, bouncing WMDC services or device soft resets would fix it. Therefore, nothing no my PC or device was deleted. Of course, I have files out of sync now. Thanks goodness for Exchange as that is how my PIM info is sync'd.
It is really a sad state of affairs when I pull out my device to do something and think "why bother? I'll never get this data to my PC reliably anyway." I am to the point now that if I can't put it in a task that syncs back to Outlook, I just about don't fool with apps on my Pocket PC anymore. I never thought I'd find myself wishing I could install ActiveSync.
Last week I sat down at my month old brand new freshly formatted Vista Ultimate laptop to do my weekly ritual of synchronizing my documents and make a copy of everything on my SD card. I had set the partnership up the day after loading the OS, and after a few reboots, soft resets and some WMDC automatic updates, everything was working fine. Then last week, I docked the device and got an error in WMDC. I unplugged my device and plugged it back in. It started to sync and I thought all was ok. However, I soon realized that my partnership had been renamed. It now said "Ed's Smartphone" instead of HansWizard. WMDC proceeded to then rename my sync folder on my PC from "Documents on HansWizard" to "Documents on Ed's Smartphone." This was especially useful to me now as applications like ListPro, eWallet and HanDBase no longer knew where to find the files. :evil: This turned out to be not much of a problem though, as WMDC also decided to delete about 90% of my files from both the PC and device, so there were really no files to be found. :bad-words: It was that same feeling when you get poked in the eye. It hurts, you aren't sure exactly what happened and you can't quite regain your senses fast enough. You are just stunned.
Fortunately, I had backed up my machine to a USB drive recently, so I got my files back as they existed on my PC, but a weeks worth of work on the device was now gone. Thankfully, no new userIDs and passwords had been added to eWallet on my device, but I still lost some info in ListPro, PocketBible and a few other apps.
Preparing for the worst, today I made a copy of the My Documents folder on the device before starting the sync routine. I am happy to report it wasn't necessary. WMDC refused to connect at all. No amount of rebooting, bouncing WMDC services or device soft resets would fix it. Therefore, nothing no my PC or device was deleted. Of course, I have files out of sync now. Thanks goodness for Exchange as that is how my PIM info is sync'd.
It is really a sad state of affairs when I pull out my device to do something and think "why bother? I'll never get this data to my PC reliably anyway." I am to the point now that if I can't put it in a task that syncs back to Outlook, I just about don't fool with apps on my Pocket PC anymore. I never thought I'd find myself wishing I could install ActiveSync.
