[Guide] iTunes doesn’t detect your iPhone anymore? Here’s a solution

About a week ago, iTunes stopped detecting my iPhone 5S. Windows Explorer detected it alright. I could see it as a device. And I could access the photos folder once I designated the PC as a Trusted PC. But you had to press Trust this PC every time I connected the phone to the PC.

Apple has done a lot of things so that you don’t need to depend on iTunes to download everything. You could download/buy stuff and update iOS over the internet directly. That’s great, but you still cannot copy any files to the phone from the PC without iTunes. You could use Dropbox (copy the file to Dropbox, sync on the phone and open the file in the respective app) but you cannot do that with large media files. You still need iTunes.

I reinstalled iTunes many times. But it didn’t fix the problem.

But last night it hit me that it could be one of those other services that gets installed when you install iTunes which could be causing the issue. I thought that all of them are removed when you remove iTunes. That was NOT the case.

The million other services that iTunes installs

So I first uninstalled iTunes and all of the other services and stuff one by one. After that I rebooted the PC. When the PC booted back to the desktop, I downloaded the latest iTunes installer from Apple website, and installed it.

Once the installation was completed, I connected the phone. iTunes was automatically launched (that’s the default behavior unless you disable a service) and it could see my iPhone 5S.

[Guide] Launching iTunes minimized in Windows

I use the Home Sharing feature of iTunes to watch movies and TV shows I’ve added to the media library. Thus it is important for me to have iTunes running in the background all the time. You can add iTunes to your Windows startup, but it is better to have iTunes start minimized.

So how do you normally add an application to Windows startup and launch it minimized? You create a shortcut to the application you want and set the startup mode (or “Run” mode) to “Minimized”. Then you copy the shortcut to the Startup folder in your user profile and boom.

I have to agree that Microsoft is dumb when it comes to certain things. They have made it so hard to access this Startup folder in Windows 8. With previous OSes, you can simply access it from the Start Menu. But that’s not the case anymore. Your Startup folder is located here:

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

 

But we all know that iTunes sucks on Windows. It is darn slow and bloated, and in this case, it wouldn’t launch minimized by using the above trick. In fact, it doesn’t launch at all! You cannot even open it by double clicking the icon, until you kill the process from Task Manager.

But there is a trick. Using the following VB Script, you can open iTunes Minimized. Actually, it launches iTunes maximized or to whatever size it opens by default, and then minimize it momentarily. You just copy it to the Startup folder and boom.

MinimiTunes

Yes, it is not an elegant workaround (I mean, it opens and then minimizes, instead of starting minimized). But it works.