iPhone upgrades: These things are sent to try us

Reading around the Apple support forums, post-iOS 5 upgrades, there have been some amusing problems encountered by long-suffering iPhone owners. One of my favourites is that of Imogen Heap among others, who now has Google Maps in Chinese. I say amusing, because one day we will look back on this and laugh.

I had been trying to upgrade iTunes for about six months – but only intermittently, whenever Apple prompted me. I would click on ‘go on then’, wait while the software downloaded and installed - and then curse when my internet connection went down. I would then have to go through the laborious process of going back to a restore point and recreating my library, because old iTunes wouldn’t open up with the new library, which somehow slipped through the system restore net. I tried it a couple of times six months ago, and a couple of times since, so was becoming quite adept at having a backed up library ready to slip in ready before attempting to restart the program. I Googled my problem but could find very little on the support groups in the way of help.

When iOS 5 became available I decided I would solve this little problem. There must be a rational explanation. And I remembered that I was paying several pounds a month to Carphone Warehouse for some Geek Squad who would surely be able to help? I tried downloading the iTunes update, which of course was necessary before upgrading the phone. Lordy me if I didn’t lose my internet connection. System restore. What’s this? Apple network adapter. Just after the software download. Strange. Any way, system restore, drag the library in and everything back to normal. Try again. Lordy me again. No internet. My phone was working from the home hub so it wasn’t that. Definitely something to do with the download.

Time to call the Geek Squad. Got through quite quickly. No complaints there. ‘It must be your ISP.’ It’s not my ISP – my phone and my wife’s laptop are working quite happily on wi-fi from the home hub. ‘Apple don’t do anything to your computer, they just download software.’ But surely it looks as if  it is affecting my wi-fi network? Then I think he tried to blame my firewall, but that line fizzled out. ‘You should uninstall iTunes and reinstall it from scratch. Sounds like iTunes is corrupted. And by the way, we only deal with iPhone problems, so if the fault is with your computer, we can look into it for you but you’ll probably have to pay for a different policy.’ Thank you and goodbye.

I so nearly uninstalled iTunes. I wondered what the drawbacks would be. I’d lose quite a bit of data. Album covers? Podcasts? Fortunately I decided to give Google another go. Even more fortunately I hit on a thread with exactly my problem, including an answer. Thanks to TG10987 in the Apple support communities, I discovered that iTunes was indeed removing a network component. The cure was to uninstall my network adaptor and reboot, which reinstalled it – relatively smoothly – and thus restoring my laptop’s connection with the outside world. Deep joy.

Since then of course I have had to deal with none of my apps working (go to the app store, download an app, run it and then all the other apps work again); ringtones stopped working (deleted my personalised ones and reinstalled); random album covers have disappeared from my iPhone library and appear on the iTunes input screen as ‘artwork not modifiable’ (still working on it but it seems the only solution is to delete from the library, reinstall from my fortunately backed up archives on hard drive and resync to the phone); and whatever else the future has in store for me. Luckily it seems that lots of people have had similar problems, some more weird than others, so there is usually a tip from someone who has worked them out.

Oh well, onward and upward, but first I feel a complaint letter to Carphone Warehouse coming on.