6 Hours To Install Blackberry Upgrade
Upgrading my blackberry took a long time on Sunday. Every time I tried to install the firmware upgrade program, my PC would hang during the the install of ActiveSync, requiring a hard reset of Windows. Why the Blackberry software was trying to install ActiveSync I never questioned.
I tried uninstalling every peice of PDA related software and disabling the virus checker, since I not longer use a PocketPc. Nothing helped.
I finally completely uninstalled the virus checker, a vestige of a previous employers requirements for having a VPN connection, and ActiveSync finally installed correctly, but no Blackberry firmware updates nor Blackberry desktop were installed.
After some head scratching and useless discussion with Rogers wireless support, I finally figured out that the Blackberry installers unzip themselves in the same folder in which they are stored, and then run a setup.exe in that folder. The problem is, I save all my downloads to the same folder, so there was a setup.exe kicking around from a previous download of ActiveSync. Installing the blackberry software displayed a nice splash screen indicating it was unziping the necessary files (silently ignoring the failure of unzipping itself), then would go on the launch the setup.exe already in the same folder.
The Rogers Wireless tech support rep was no help in solving the problem.
When I solved it and explained what was going on to him, and asked if he were going to log it as a defect, he said they were already aware of the problem. Grr.
I can totally understand my machine requiring a reset because a virus checker interefered with an install of ActiveSync. Having the installer I click on actually run another installer because an unzip happens in the current folder instead of a temporary folder like you would expect was very dissapointing.
My Blackberry doesn’t work at all from my Mac. There are a few cases like this where software I need only runs on windows, so I keep my Windows PC around and turn it on every few months out of necessity. It is a noisy beast, I should see if I can install Windows on my Mac.
Technorati Tags: BlackBerry, ActiveSync, Windows
November 26th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
[...] I wrote how it took me six hours to get the blackberry software installed on my PC, required in preparation for upgrading the firmware on my blackberry and synchronizing my contacts from Outlook. [...]