![](\"post-images\/070611-activesync.gif\" "\\"ActiveSync")
<\/p>\nThis window is the bane of my life. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It’s the ActiveSync-couldn’t-talk-to-my-PDA-for-some-reason view, and it’s probably displayed on my screen more that anything else.<\/p>\n
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of this quality bit of software, Microsoft ActiveSync is supposed to let you synchronise your Windows Mobile PDA with your PC. Except, it hardly ever works – most of the time you plug it in, it thinks about it for a few seconds before stopping and displaying the error window above. <\/p>\n
So how do you get it to work?<\/p>\n
The short answer is: “I don’t know. Wish I did.” \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
The slightly longer answer is: “I don’t know… but here are some of the things that I normally try!”<\/p>\n
First thing I normally try is to restart ActiveSync. I have a batch file in my PATH which kills the ActiveSync processes in order, waits a moment, then restarts it:<\/p>\n
asrbt.bat:\r\n @echo off \r\n killf WCESMgr.exe\r\n killf wcescomm.exe\r\n killf rapimgr.exe\r\n sleep 3\r\n start \"\" \"C:\\\\Program Files\\\\bLADE\\\\Windows Mobile\\\\Microsoft ActiveSync\\\\WCESMgr.exe\"\r\n @echo on<\/code><\/pre>\nSo I unplug my PDA, run the batch file to restart ActiveSync, plug it in again and cross my fingers. <\/p>\n
Repeat until it connects – on a good day it will connect after six or seven restarts.<\/p>\n
Free up memory on the PDA<\/h3>\n
It seems that if you have too many apps running on the PDA, this stops ActiveSync running successfully. <\/p>\n
So I unplug my PDA, go into Memory<\/strong> applet in Settings<\/strong>, and stop every task, then plug it in again. Sometimes, this does the trick.<\/p>\nReset the USB connection from the PDA<\/h3>\n
With the PDA still connected to the PC, I go into the USB to PC<\/strong> applet in the Connections panel of Settings<\/strong>. This has a single check box: “Enable advanced network functionality”.<\/p>\nChecking or clearing the tick box then pressing OK causes the connection to be broken and restarted, apparently in a different mode. Repeating this, flipping back and forth between ticked and unticked, will often get ActiveSync to connect successfully. (More often than not, the successful connection will be when the checkbox is cleared.)<\/p>\n
Reset the PDA<\/h3>\n
Annoyingly, one of the most effective actions is to do a soft-reset on the PDA. Not always, though… sometimes there seems to be no other way than to reset the PDA and…<\/p>\n
Restart the PC<\/h3>\n
Restarting both the PC and the PDA often does the trick. Again, not always, though – on a bad day, it will take a few restarts of both PC and PDA before ActiveSync will connect successfully. These are the days where you will find me loudly cursing everyone responsible for ActiveSync! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Any others?<\/h3>\n
I’ve been using PocketPC devices for years now, and have watched the platform improve significantly. So it’s a shame that ActiveSync has always felt like the weak link in the chain for me – my experiences with it have been that it is flaky, unreliable and massively infuriating. <\/p>\n
The physical connection normally seems fine – clicking on ‘Explore’ in the ActiveSync window as shown above will happily open a File Explorer for the PDA storage and let me copy files to and from the PDA. But the synchronisation software will just refuse to start. <\/p>\n
Do other people have similar experiences? Does anyone know of any other tricks to get ActiveSync to work? My list is in no way definitive – it is based on trial-and-error of things that seem to have worked in the past, but I’m always looking for better ways!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This window is the bane of my life. It’s the ActiveSync-couldn’t-talk-to-my-PDA-for-some-reason view, and it’s probably displayed on my screen more that anything else. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of this quality bit of software, Microsoft ActiveSync is supposed to let you synchronise your Windows Mobile PDA with your PC. Except, it hardly ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}