This Christmas was the excuse we needed to change wireless companies. We've been with AT&T (aka Cingular) wireless for maybe ten years. During that period, the service has not improved at all. We are not iPod or PDA users, we just wanted reliable phones with good coverage. So, to make a long story short, we switched our family to Verizon. It's too early to tell how well Verizon will perform in this part of the country. So far, the coverage is much better than AT&T.
However, this article is about device driver installation issues. Specifically, I had some problems getting my computer to recognize my Motorola W755 wireless phone.
I was not able to get the Verizon software to install and recognize my new phone. While most of the USB drivers installed correctly, something called an "MTP Device" refused to install, ending with the message "The specified service does not exist as an installed service." I knew as soon as this message displayed, things would not be easy.
After several days of internet searches using Bing, Google and Yahoo, I came across a similar entry regarding installation of a Zune on someone's computer. It turns out my driver installation problem was really an issue with my installation of Windows Media Player 11. (I don't really use WMP, so I didn't know it wasn't installed correctly.)
For those of you looking for the cookbook solution:
- Uninstall Rhapsody with V CAST
- Uninstall Motorola Device Drivers
- Rollback (uninstall) Windows Media Player 11
- Reboot
- Uninstall Windows Media Player 11 Format
- Reboot
- Install Windows Media Player 11
- Reboot
- Install Motorola Device Drivers
- Install Rhapsody with V CAST
- Start Rhapsody
- Plug in your W755
- Go to Media Manager on your phone and Sync your music.
- Rhapsody will recognize your phone.
A future post will describe using SetupAPI.log with increased logging facilities to track down device driver installation issues. As it turns out, Windows offers a lot of debugging help, if you know where to look.