My friend Matt, a fan of all things Apple and future switcher, owns a laptop. Actually it is a tablet-PC and has all of the latest hardware and software including a 64bit processor and gobs of RAM. Though my blood runs thick with Mac-cells, I know a good piece of hardware when I see it, and Matt’s laptop is top-of-the-line. There is only one problem; it came pre-installed with Windows Vista.
I’ve only got limited experience with Vista but from that limited experience I have drawn the opinion that if I were forced to use the Operating System full time I’d likely jump off of a bridge. This isn’t to say that I’m not willing to admit that in many ways Vista is vastly superior to its predecessors (like, say, in the security department) but I don’t even like the way that it does these few things better. You know what? We’ll get into this at a whole different time, b’okay?
So Matt has a great laptop that runs Vista. Fast forward to ‘the other day’ and Matt picked himself up a brand-new shiny iPhone. If you know Matt, and some of you reading this do, you’ll know that at this point Matt’s blood is practically boiling with excitement. He probably can’t shut his mouth for even a second and his hair has gone straight. This kid wanted an iPhone pretty badly.
Matt Dottle approves
Matt calls me: “Dude, I got an iPhone! Now what do I need to do? Just go home and plug it in right?” My reply: “Yeah. Everything should work man you just bought an Apple product. Go home. Make sure you have the latest version of iTunes and you should be all good.”
I think by now you realize where this is going. Matt installed the latest version of iTunes, plugged in his iPhone and received the following message: “iPhone not recognized in this version of iTunes.” This message is a bit of a misnomer but I’ll skip right to the part where I explain what is going on here.
During the iTunes installation Vista blocked the iPhone’s USB driver from being installed.
It is pretty much as simple as that. I don’t care if there are good or bad reasons for why this happens. And I don’t care whose fault it is because I’m blaming both Apple and Microsoft for not displaying an error message about how to fix the issue. But I think this sucks.
Oh, you know what sucks worse: If you are running Windows Vista 64bit you can not use iPhone. You will get this same error message mention above only you won’t be able to solve the issue like we did. It is merely a footnote on Apple’s Web site under minimum system requirements for iPhone. I am not sure if this is Apple dragging its feet on a 64bit driver for Windows or if this is something on Microsoft’s end.
So here is how you fix it in the 32bit version of Windows Vista; You need to turn off UAC, User Access Control, before you begin the iTunes installation. So if you’ve already installed iTunes, uninstall it using the same installer that you used to install iTunes, then turn off UAC by opening your Control Panel and searching for User Access Control in the top right hand search box. Install iTunes again, and voila!
I’m happy that there is a solution, and I’m not that bitter, it just took way too long to find the answer to this problem and I would love to see Apple or Microsoft handle this issue a little better. Having a better error message would go a long way I think.
Combine this UAC headache and the fact that we couldn’t activate iPhone for him until the next day and you see why we were frustrated.
My next story will be about Epson’s printers. Have you had any crappy tech experiences lately? Pingback this post if you have.
20 Comments
Very Niice!
I have nearly the same problem only i get a ‘insert disk that came with the product to install’ message??? firstly the iphone does not ship with an istallation disk and windows should auto detect this, right? WRONG.
It works fine on my friends computer auto detecting it straight away, any ideas????
Tried the fix on the my 32-bit OS… didn’t work for me! And couldn’t find User Access control… did you mean user account control?
Thanks!
ste: You need to download the latest version of iTunes and install that. It should have everything you need to use an iPhone on Windows.
Tracy: If you are on Vista, there is a search box on your control panel. So click your Windows button (bottom left hand side of your screen), click Control Panel, then do a search for User Access Control, and it should be one of the results. I couldn’t find it either, but that is what I did.
Great blog, but … not a happy ending for me. My PC “cannot” find the driver for the iPhone. I did as you said (uninstalled iTunes, turn off UAC [BTW named: User Account Control], installed latest version of iTunes) and … nothing. Still got the same driver issue screwing things up.
Argh!
All I want to do is get the photos out of my Camera Roll and on to my PC without having to email them to myself one at a time.
Maybe I’ll have to give in and buy a Mac.
Thanks for the blog though – I’m sure it’s been a great help to loads of people.
Okay, so this is the first time ever responding to a blog – I know, I must live in the dark ages! I thought I was getting into the “future” as, I just bought my iphone. Never having had an ipod or anything apple, I was excited to test it out and see what all the rage is about. Unfortunately, I too have the 64bit windows vista, which has been a nightmare trying to get my adobe creative suite to work, but it is even more upsetting that I cannot use my iphone on my own computer!
All I can say is that Apple and Microsoft really need to get their act together on this one. It is very frustrating! Let me know if anyone hears of a solution soon!
My laptop running a 32 bit window vista operating system. Turn off UAC, uninstall virus software, re-install latest iTune, Apple mobile device service running,USBAppl.sys in place….but OS prompt USB device attached has malfunctioned and windows cannot recognize it. Try manually update driver but windows prompt not compatible.
Don’t know what else to do….can anyone help?
Sunny: It seems like you’ve tried just about everything! When Windows says the the drive is not compatible does it give you an option to “continue installing anyway”? If it does, go ahead and continue with the installation and it should work fine.
Otherwise, I’d suggest looking in Apple’s Discussion Boards for more information on what you might try. I don’t have any Windows machine here to give it a spin.
Hope you figure it out!
i just want to tell you that i had the exact same problem and was actually crying because i wanted it to work sooo badly and it wouldn’t, and i eventually found this and followed your instructions and it worked, so thank you soooo much!!!!!!! i would have been crying over my windows vista computer all night if it wasn’t for you
I thought Ihad found the answer! I can see iPhone in XP on this dual boot, not in Vista.
UN-REinstalled iTunes, as suggested. User Control was already off.
Still MIA
I don’t have one of these bits of kit, but if the driver isn’t signed it might not let you install it. So I’m going to take a wild guess that they aren’t and go through a few steps that could solve it.
So you could restart Vista 32 bit, hold down F8 and choose the option about letting you install unsigned drivers. 64bit Vista doesn’t let you install unsigned drivers out of the box.
When running the setup program, you shouldn’t need to turn off UAC otherwise anything running (including malware) in your session could get admin rights without your say so. Instead you could right click on the setup program, and choose “run as administrator” – that way only that process is running as admin.
Some antivirus and antispyware software may also stop things installing, so choose a snooze option of both of those things.
Well, it is possible to bypass the digital signing issue with Vista x64. The steps are quite easy, and you can get this working with no problem whatsoever.
Try here:
http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102167&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=82d34980e204ad8f095943a26cd5462c
Read through the three pages..you will get it working.
Man, oh man… I wish I had googled and found your post about iPhone and Itunes/Vista a couple of hours ago. I just spend, seriously, 2.5 hours on the phone with Apple support who could NOT figure out any solution to why my iTunes on Vista couldn’t recognize my 3G. We tried EVERYTHING — uninstall, new user accounts, deactivating firewall/av, and on and on and on… Finally they just said it was a Vista issue and although would float it up to their “developers” to review for any ideas.
There are also tons of posts on Apple support with people having the exact same problem.
Your solution worked flawlessly and was so simple! Thank you — thank you — thank you!!!
Here’s a link to my posts on the Apple board so you can appreciate my and all the others-in-the-same-boat’s frustration
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9072289#9072289
Hmmm. This did NOT work for me. The checkbox for UAC (that is the search term, BTW, not User Access Control) is off and apparently never was on.
Right now the bozos at Apple are telling me that I should use the 64 bit Itunes installer – don’t know why.
Vista x64 and my iPhone work fine together. iTunes recognizes it and even shows up as a digital camera device in explorer.
I have a 3G S, maybe the issue was fixed in the 3.0 update?
Hey dudes there,
I tried and even installed the USBAAPL.SYS file in the system32 folder and windows\inf folder as I found out in websites but still my iphone 8GB is not recognized by my system. I am using a Windows Pavilion dv2000 with Windows Vista Ultimate. Please try and sort out how to make my system recognize the iphone device.
hey.. I just got off the phone with Apple and they solved my issue.. all you have to do it delete any photos that was not taken with ya iphone that is in you camera roll and it should work… i email all the pics that i had got from mms and online and it worked for me. they said they dont know why the other pics mess up but they do and they are working on a fix for the problem…
My iphone was doing the same thing, and I didn’t want to reset the phone without taking backups off of it. I finally found a solution that didn’t involve install restarts. I had downloaded a fair few podcasts over my WIFI network direct to my phone not wanting to boot up my computer. It turns out that THIS is the root cause of my problem, because once I had deleted the new podcasts, the phone connected when I tried to plug it back in.
So before you factory reset the phone and reinstall the software, it might be worth deleting any podcasts you may have pulled to the phone directly.
Thanks for the help, your tip worked perfectly!
I have an iphone 2g and it is not being recognized by windows 7 but when I plug in a different iphone same 2g 8g it installs every driver needed and it works prefectly fine. Is there anything I can do to make my iphone work again.
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