I am rephoned - but still need help

[dreamshark]

I somehow lost my cell phone on our Thanksgiving trip to San Jose. I'm still baffled where it could have gone, but it really seems to be thoroughly gone. I dragged my feet on deactivating the account since I was so sure it would turn up in Amber's apartment, but it didn't. My liability was limited because it's a prepaid service. Nobody used any of my minutes, though, so most likely nobody found it. Anyway, the phone is gone but I have $75 left in the account. I'm not crazy about ATT service, but I hate to just forfeit the remaining minutes.

I really wasn't sure what to do. Oddly enough, there is absolutely no information on phone company websites on the options for replacing a lost phone. I guess they want you to just show up at a phone store asking for help, whereupon they will try to sell you a replacement phone for $$$$. After much research on phone forums I finally realized that all I needed was an old GSM phone and an unprogrammed SIM chip. AT&T charges $25 for a new SIM. I bought one online for $3.77 (shipping included!). I was going to try to put the new chip in my old silver Razr phone, but got a better offer - my friend ssussminh kindly gave me her newer/better golden Razr. I put the chip in, called ATT to get it activated, and bingo! It works! I still have the same phone number and all my minutes!

However, one thing I had forgotten about the Razr was how difficult it is to get it to connect to a computer. Although it has a nice mini-USB port, the phone was carefully designed to require a piece of proprietary and massively overpriced software called "Motorola Phone Tools." I actually have that software on my computer, but I cannot get it to recognize my new phone. Now that I see it in action I recall having the same problem with my old phone. I think I eventually managed to get it to work, but darned if I know how. I've looked online and found many many questions in online forums about this problem, but no real answers except to keep fiddling with it until it finally works. Motorola doesn't sell this phone any more, so they are no help.

ssussminh was syncing her phone with her laptop via Bluetooth, but I have a desktop computer that doesn't support Bluetooth. I've tried every suggestion I could find for getting this crappy software to recognize the phone, and it has failed repeatedly. Now I'm trying a different approach - trying to get the computer to recognize the SIM card as a data disk. I don't care about all the fancy features in MPT anyway - I just want to be able to transfer pictures and music files back and forth.

This should work. I have downloaded Razrv3-specific drivers to my computer. I switched the USB setting in the phone to Data Disk. When I plug it in, the computer finds the hardware and installs it. When I look in the Windows Device Manager I can see the device, correctly identified as a RazrV3xx disk! But I can't see this device in "My Computer" or find any other way to actually access it.

Anybody have any ideas? My computer is running Windows XP, incidentally.

Comments

Figured it out - partly anyway

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I finally found a Motorola FAQ page on how to upgrade Motorola Phone Tools to the version needed to support this phone. I had, of course, tried MULTIPLE times to upgrade it through the automatically presented "Live Update" screen, which claimed every time that I had the latest version. There turns out to be a different way to start Live Update that actually finds the upgrade and performs it. This worked, MPT now discovers my phone.

It is still a crappy piece of software, IMHO. I still don't see how to transfer pictures and music files, although I think the picture feature is buried in this stupid interface somewhere.