Tuesday, July 12, 2011

iTunes Freezes When I Plug my iPhone In

Whenever I plug my iPhone into my PC over USB, iTunes freezes. It instantly unfreezes when I unplug my iPhone. This may have started happening following an iTunes update in April-2011. It may indeed be caused by this update or it may be co-incidence and the fault may be electronic, related to my overclocked system.

iTunes also freezes under any other user account on the same machine. Even if iTunes has frozen, the iPhone is available under 'My Computer' and gives me access to digital photos I took with the iPhone.

The iPhone works fine with any other machine and doesn't cause iTunes to freeze.

I have installed all Apple updates and I've exhaustively followed this guide: iTunes: May become unresponsive when connecting iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

My system: Windows 7 64-bit; Intel Core i7 @ 2.67GHz


My Solution
  1. Plug in your iPhone and allow iTunes to freeze
  2. Click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services
  3. Right-click the service called "Apple Mobile Device" and choose "Restart"
  4. iTunes will become responsive for a fraction of a second, but may then freeze again
  5. Repeat step 3 until iTunes becomes responsive and your iPhone appears under "DEVICES" in the left-hand panel.
  6. I normally have to restart the mobile device service 2 or 3 times before iTunes becomes responsive again

Update 25-Jul-2011

It would seem that the iTunes 10.4.0.80 update has resolved this problem for me.