Problems connecting a Windows Phone device to an ASUS P7P55D PRO motherboard

I have had some problems when connecting Windows Phone devices to my desktop computer, from when it had Windows 7 installed and my phone was an HTC Trophy to right now, with Windows 8.1 and a Lumia 920. Other USB devices had no problem synchronizing but connecting a Windows Phone almost always resulted in weird behaviour:

  • The notification alert for device connected/disconnected played, but the device didn’t appear anywhere, not even Device Manager.
  • Device appeared, but when opening any window that had to list it, explorer.exe hanged.
  • Device appeared and everything seemed OK, but opening the Windows Phone application failed to connect with the “Your phone is having troubles” message. Trying to deploy an application from Visual Studio failed with the error “This operation returned because the timeout period expired“.

The solution is very simple: go ahead and flash the latest BIOS version available (2101, released on 06/11/2012). You can use the integrated EZ Flash 2 tool from the BIOS menu to do it easily, because it can read the ROM file from a plugged USB device or from the computer’s disk, even if it is formatted as NTFS.

My motherboard had the stock version (0501, from 26/08/2009), and I suspect that the version that fixed the problem is 0915 since it lists “Improve compatibility with some USB device” in the changelog.

Error 80072EFD on Nokia Lumia 800

A month or so ago I switched from my old HTC 7 Trophy to a brand new Nokia Lumia 800. Having Yoigo (a spanish mobile virtual network operator) I just inserted the SIM card, configured the APN and enabled roaming, thinking it would work the same way as in my old phone.

I got signal and everything started working like a charm, until some time later I couldn’t do anything that involved the data connection. Refreshing any email account displayed the dreaded 80072EFD error, and Twitter/Facebook/Internet Explorer said they couldn’t connect at all. Pretty annoying, since sometimes it started working when deactivating airplane mode or changing from one cellular network to another.

It looks like the only solution to this problem is to download the Nokia-exclusive Network Setup application. You can find it in the Nokia Collection section of the marketplace (it doesn’t appear at all throught the web marketplace, so you have to download it from your phone), and running it performs some kind of black magic that lets your data connection behave properly.