Windows Mobile Device Center OOBE- just shoot me

By Nov. 26, 2007, 7:00am PT 19 Comments

CluelessI have been happy to be able to sync my Windows Mobile (WM) device over-the-air (OTA) with my Exchange Server without needing to connect the WM device to my Vista computer.  My past experiences with syncing via ActiveSync have been abysmal to say the least and I have avoided it for a long time.  Last night I wanted to install the EverNote Technical Preview for WM and I figured, incorrectly it turns out, that I would need to sync that via the Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) to use it properly.  The WMDC is the newer, better version of ActiveSync that runs under Windows Vista.  I thought it over and figured that since Vista has been out for a good while and that the WMDC has been upgraded from 6.0 to 6.1 that the out of box experience (OOBE) would have to be better than past efforts.  Silly me, just shoot me.

The first thing I did was connect the WM device (HTC Advantage) to my Vista notebook (HP 2710p) via USB cable.  Vista immediately started its "installing device driver" which took over five minutes while it installed something strange. I can’t recall the device driver name but it was something to do with Windows Mobile Remote Access something or other.  After the device driver install completed, which it said completed normally, I waited for the WMDC to fire up thinking surely it was part of Vista now.  Silly me, just shoot me.

The disk drive kept thrashing as if something was going to happen but it never did.  I had to go online and download the WMDC, which before this process was over I would be calling the Weapons of Mass Destruction Center.  This download was small but the install process, which was run with the Advantage connected, took well over 30 minutes.  During this install process another device driver was installed, where an icon with a Bluetooth logo indicated that "unknown device" installed correctly.  This first part of the install was called a device driver upgrade which is weird since nothing had been installed before to upgrade  After a long while the WMDC install proper fired up and went for a while until it reached a successful conclusion.  I figured the WMDC would then fire up automatically since the WM device was connected.  Silly me, just shoot me.

Nothing would fire up the WMDC and I disconnected/ reconnected the HTC several times.  With nothing working I remembered that we mentioned a year ago that the beta of OneCare would interfere with the beta of Vista and steps had to be taken.  I didn’t for a minute believe that the now golden OneCare would interfere with the golden Vista.  Silly me, just shoot me.

Googling for "WMDC problem" led me to a Microsoft KB article that says that the OneCare firewall can block the WMDC and if that happened the following steps should be taken.  You have to change the OneCare firewall settings to allow ActiveSync/ WMDC connections and add a port manually to make sure the setting really takes.  Now, I’m thinking to myself that I’m using Microsoft Vista, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Microsoft OneCare so they should be able to figure out what they need to do to work without my interventions.  Silly me, just shoot me.

Ripping this hole in the firewall did the trick and when I fired up WMDC it started and after a few minutes of "connecting" I even got a window with a picture of the Advantage to prove it was really connected:

Wmdc

At this point I was surely going to see some real progress.  Silly me, just shoot me.

Remember I sync everything OTA with my Exchange Server and the only item that it should be syncing is my Mobile Favorites from IE.  I hovered the cursor over the sync window and see that it is slowly syncing 586 items in the Mobile Favorites.  It did this for over 20 minutes and then the progress bar, which had reached a 2/3 level, started over.  A quick hover of the cursor told me that it had indeed started over and had now synced 3 of 286 items.  This took another 20 minutes and it finally indicated that all the favorites had been synced.  Another 10 minutes of doing who knows what and the the initial sync completed successfully and all was finally right in the world.  Silly me, just shoot me.

I got busy playing with other stuff and decided an hour later to connect the HTC and see how long a real sync would take.  Connecting the HTC should have made the WMDC fire up automatically but it didn’t so I manually fired it up.  Instead of seeing a nice "Connected" indicator in WMDC I see only a red X icon and the word "Error".  No *&^*& that’s all it said.  I disconnected the HTC and plugged it in again and this time after two full minutes the indicator showed that I was connected.  I waited a while and saw the syncing progress bar start up and end shortly thereafter with a "Sync Error".  That’s all it said and remember this is just the second time it’s tried to sync so nothing has happened between when it did the first one and now.  Sync Error.  Silly me, just shoot me.

I can’t believe that this whole experience is still as bad now as it was when all of this software was in beta stages.  Didn’t anyone learn ANYTHING from the beta process that would fix this?  How can someone who is not familiar with this technology handle this whole god-awful experience?  This isn’t an OOBE, it’s an OOME (out of mind experience).  I’m not silly but MS shot me anyway..

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