When All Else Fails…

…change the cable.

A few days ago, my Nokia Lumia 800 phone suddenly refused to connect to my PC for synchronising. I’d plug it in, but nothing would happen – Windows would not react to the connection, the Zune software would not start, zilch. And when I disconnected the phone, Windows would give me an error saying: “USB device not recognized”. However, the phone would still charge via the connecting cable, so at least something was happening.

So I searched the web for this error and got lots of advice. Mostly involving uninstalling and re-installing the Zune software on the PC and doing a hard reset on the phone (which loses all my information on the phone).

I followed all of this, without any resolution of the problem. I even installed the Zune software on another PC and tried connecting the phone there. Still the same error.

Right, this then meant that there were two possibilities:

• Either the phone was faulty, or
• the connecting cable was faulty.

Not having a spare micro-USB cable handy, I decided to buy a new cable, at – gulp – €24.95. It arrived today. With some trepidation, I plugged it in and voilá – synchronisation began.

So the moral of the story is that even with modern electronic devices it can still be simply a  faulty cable that causes the problem.