In the middle of one of my least favorite activities. . .
Trying to get support for a product and justify to the technician why they should help me and why it isn't someone elses issue to remedy. At least I'm not talking to someone halfway around the world.
The issue: My Treo has stopped Hot Syncing. My laptop now says it is an unrecognized device. Tried reinstalling Hot Sync and the Palm Desktop.
The guy from Sprint says you can't have multiple synchronization programs on a single PC. In my case, that would be iTunes and Hot Sync. This is a Microsoft issue. Whoa! Blame it on the big target. Nice try. I pointed out that the new 700p natively synchs the smartphone and iTunes using Pocket Tunes. Says so on the PalmOne website. He's flustered. "Where do you see that?!?"
UPDATE:
I asked the Sprint PCS technician to provide me with documentation from the Microsoft Knowledgebase acknowledging that Windows XP can only handle one conduit or synchronization software per machine. I was on hold for over 20 minutes. He couldn't find anything.
His excuse?
"Well, iTunes was not originally developed for Windows, so it obviously shouldn't be run on Windows. And there is no way Microsoft would acknowledge that Windows XP would support iTunes. You know, they don't get along."
Huh? I guess the Windows version of iTunes was some skunkworks project at Apple.
He also went on to explain how the new 700p (see above) is able to work with iTunes using Pocket Tunes.
"iTunes is only used to convert the music files to mp3 before being synched."
I see, so the user must have to uninstall iTunes before synching. I told him good luck finding a statement like that in a user document.
While on hold waiting for the Sprint PCS support technician to find me something saying iTunes and Hotsync wouldn't work together, I posted to a thread on TreoCentral. We'll see if I get any responses.
Finally, he didn't know what to say other than to call Palm directly. I called and they had me perform a hard reset, uninstall the Palm Desktop software, and then reinstall. It worked.
Sprint PCS support technicians are big dummies. I wonder how many times I need to repeat that to make sure it shows up at the top of a Google search?