B
Bassthang
I've used my Dell Inspiron 13 Windows 10 laptop to connect to a Huawei Honor 9 Android phone for a year or more. It's always worked well. I transfer photos and sound recordings from the phone to the laptop using Explorer. The files are in the phone's internal storage.
However, since a few weeks ago, I have started to have intermittent problems connecting. The green indexer bar in the address bar spends longer than usual (and "usual" has meant "painfully slow" for a long time already) crawling across, and when it finishes I just see "This folder is empty" for the internal storage. Sometimes I can get the folders to show by repeated disconnect/reconnect or cycling through the USB connection options on the phone (files > photos > charging > files again), and then often it fails with the same error at the next folder down (e.g. going into DCIM or Sounds). Every now and then it works, but I can't seem to find a repeatable method of getting it to work. Even when I do get it to work eventually, I can now waste an hour or so doing a simple file transfer that used to take two minutes. This is not good!
(I think that in general the W10 search indexer service is flaky: I nearly always have to wait for it to do its business whenever I open a folder (local, USB or networked). I don't remember it being this bad on Win7, and on my old WinXP machine that I keep for running music software it's wonderful to do file operations without having to wait for that damn indexer to finish poking around!)
If I connect the phone to another laptop (an old E6400, also running Win10), everything works fine, just as it used to do with my main machine: I can see all internal storage folders and copy files with ease. So I'm fairly certain that I don't have a hardware problem (e.g. the USB lead, the phone's port), and there are no issues with the phone's setup.
Tonight I had to wrestle with it for an hour to get it to copy my files across, and even then it refused to copy a sound recorder m4a file. Explorer was "not responding" while attempting to copy, eventually giving "the requested value cannot be determined". The same file copied across easily on the old laptop (so at least I have a workaround to get at my files).
On web forums, similar USB phone issues are discussed, but they don't seem to be cases where the process has suddenly stopped working after months of working well. Alleged fixes have involved making sure the computer is trusted by the phone's OS (well, it worked fine before, and it's the same computer - also I didn't have to set this for the second computer which had never connected to this phone before) and removing and re-installing the USB storage driver (not sure about this either - again, it used to work fine and the driver has not been changed).
My guess is that this problem is something that has come in with a recent Windows update, as there have been many updates recently. Both laptops are set to allow all updates, but the old laptop - despite having much slower processor and less RAM - still starts and runs Win10 reasonably fast, whereas the new one (which came with Win10 pre-installed) now starts and runs appallingly slow, with constant HDD access (Task Manager usually shows this to be due to another update running in the background!). It got noticeably worse about a year ago (maybe with the update that blocked the look-ahead reads on security grounds), and with every new update now it just gets slower and slower.
I'm thinking about at the very least rolling it back to an old restore point to see if this helps or as a last resort doing a factory reset and starting all over again, but I need to very carefully check and back up my stored files and software before doing this, so finding the time will be difficult.
So my question is: has anyone else had this problem start to occur recently? If so, has rolling the system back to a previous restore point helped? If not, is there anything else that might work?
Continue reading...
However, since a few weeks ago, I have started to have intermittent problems connecting. The green indexer bar in the address bar spends longer than usual (and "usual" has meant "painfully slow" for a long time already) crawling across, and when it finishes I just see "This folder is empty" for the internal storage. Sometimes I can get the folders to show by repeated disconnect/reconnect or cycling through the USB connection options on the phone (files > photos > charging > files again), and then often it fails with the same error at the next folder down (e.g. going into DCIM or Sounds). Every now and then it works, but I can't seem to find a repeatable method of getting it to work. Even when I do get it to work eventually, I can now waste an hour or so doing a simple file transfer that used to take two minutes. This is not good!
(I think that in general the W10 search indexer service is flaky: I nearly always have to wait for it to do its business whenever I open a folder (local, USB or networked). I don't remember it being this bad on Win7, and on my old WinXP machine that I keep for running music software it's wonderful to do file operations without having to wait for that damn indexer to finish poking around!)
If I connect the phone to another laptop (an old E6400, also running Win10), everything works fine, just as it used to do with my main machine: I can see all internal storage folders and copy files with ease. So I'm fairly certain that I don't have a hardware problem (e.g. the USB lead, the phone's port), and there are no issues with the phone's setup.
Tonight I had to wrestle with it for an hour to get it to copy my files across, and even then it refused to copy a sound recorder m4a file. Explorer was "not responding" while attempting to copy, eventually giving "the requested value cannot be determined". The same file copied across easily on the old laptop (so at least I have a workaround to get at my files).
On web forums, similar USB phone issues are discussed, but they don't seem to be cases where the process has suddenly stopped working after months of working well. Alleged fixes have involved making sure the computer is trusted by the phone's OS (well, it worked fine before, and it's the same computer - also I didn't have to set this for the second computer which had never connected to this phone before) and removing and re-installing the USB storage driver (not sure about this either - again, it used to work fine and the driver has not been changed).
My guess is that this problem is something that has come in with a recent Windows update, as there have been many updates recently. Both laptops are set to allow all updates, but the old laptop - despite having much slower processor and less RAM - still starts and runs Win10 reasonably fast, whereas the new one (which came with Win10 pre-installed) now starts and runs appallingly slow, with constant HDD access (Task Manager usually shows this to be due to another update running in the background!). It got noticeably worse about a year ago (maybe with the update that blocked the look-ahead reads on security grounds), and with every new update now it just gets slower and slower.
I'm thinking about at the very least rolling it back to an old restore point to see if this helps or as a last resort doing a factory reset and starting all over again, but I need to very carefully check and back up my stored files and software before doing this, so finding the time will be difficult.
So my question is: has anyone else had this problem start to occur recently? If so, has rolling the system back to a previous restore point helped? If not, is there anything else that might work?
Continue reading...