UPDATE [21st Nov 2008] – Apple have released iPhone 2.2 software update which appears to fix all known issues with BMW bluetooth and iPhones. If you had no contacts syncing or bluetooth kept dropping the connection every 20 or 30 seconds then update to 2.2 and you should find it’s all fixed.

Ever since Apple brought out iPhone 2.0 software many of us found that the iPhone contacts that used to appear on the BMW iDrive or BMW radio display suddenly disappeared.

Since iPhone2.0 we all waited patiently for a fix from Apple, 2.01 and 2.02 failed to deliver but hopes were high when reports that 2.1 fixed a similar problem with Chrysler uConnect systems but again no change for BMW drivers.

Recently I configured my iPhone to sync contacts with my Exchange server at work and this PUSHed another 2500 contacts onto my iPhone and suddenly all my contacts appeared on the iDrive. I suggested to others this might be because I had multiple address books on my iPhone but this theory was soon disproved, I then suggested that it might be because I had a high number of contacts on the iPhone keeping which may change a timeout option somewhere on the iPhone or iDrive.

Some blog readers tested this theory and created 2000 fake contacts with no phone numbers but that didn’t work, then they tried 2000 fake contacts each with a unique contact number and this worked! By using contact names beginning with Z they appeared at the end of the iPhone and iDrive list but it did take a while to sync so many contacts with the iDrive. Another reader then tweaked this to get 2000 fake contacts each with the same phone number, the iDrive ignores any contacts that have the same telephone number and only syncs with one of them, so now we had 2000 Z-contacts on the iPhone all with the same number and this allowed ALL the contacts on the iPhone to sync with the iDrive but only showed ONE z-contact at the end. [Thanks to Rajesh and vants for their help with this!]

So far the feedback has been extremely positive with around 10 out of 12 people reporting a success.

To make life easy for you I have compiled instructions on how to add 2000 fake contacts to Outlook for the Windows users and Address Book for the Apple users.

Apple OS X Users:

It really couldn’t be simpler for you, simply download the following zip file:

DOWNLOAD FOR APPLE USERS – 2000 Fake Contacts for Apple users

Open the zip file and you should have a single vCard file, simply double click this vCard file and Address Book should spring into life and ask you if you really want to import 2000 new contacts.

Just click add and you’re all done, 2000 contacts z0001 to z2000 should now be in your Address Book. 

All you need to do now is re-sync your contacts with the iPhone via iTunes. [Note - if you use MobileMe to PUSH all your contacts from your computer to MobileMe and then PUSH them down to your iPhone it will still work just have some patience and check your phone after 10 minutes]

If, for neatness, you want to have the 2000 z-contacts in their own folder simply click the +plus at the bottom of the group pane:

then give the group a name:

and now click on the Last Import folder, in the middle Name pane click on the first z0001 and then press Apple+A to select all the entries and then drag them onto the new group you just created.

You can now jump past the lengthy Windows Instructions to read what to do next..

Windows Outlook Users:

Its a little trickier for you guys, it seems it’s not as easy to simply import 2000 contacts from one vCard download, so instead you need to download the following CSV file:

DOWNLOAD FOR WINDOWS USERS – 2000 Fake Contacts for Windows Users

Once you have downloaded the CSV file in Outlook click on File from the top menu and select “Import & Export”

Then select “Import from another program or file”

Then select “Comma Separated Values (DOS)”

On the next screen click Browse and navigate to where ever you saved the CSV file to (in my case it’s on my Desktop)

Leave the option to allow duplicates and click next

Select a destination for all your contacts, in general this will be your Contacts folder

but if you want to you can create a sub-folder in contacts called “z Contacts” or “Fake Entires” and save them in there for neatness but this is not a necessity and has no influence on whether the fix will work or not.

Note: You cannot create the subfolder once you’ve started the import wizard so if you want to, you’ll have to click cancel to exit the wizard then right click on your Contacts Folder and select “New Folder” and name it “z-Contacts” or “Fake Entries” then restart from step one:

That should be it now, you’ll be present with the final screen of the wizard where you can choose to map custom fields. Originally this was necessary but I’ve since added a header row to vants CSV file so the Wizard picks the right fields for Name and Phone number automatically, just click Finish. It should then start importing all the contacts, leave this going, it can take some time, on my machine it took a few minutes but that’s because my profile isn’t store locally, you may find it’s done much quicker.

You should all be done now, if you look in your contacts your should see 2000 Z-contacts all with the same phone number.

All you need to do now is fire up iTunes and re-sync them all to your iPhone.

[Windows users - notice how much easier this whole process was on an Apple perhaps it's time to switch! Just kidding, lets not turn the comments section into an Apple vs PC bash. I spent most of my time on an XP machine at work and manage my entire office's Windows workstations and just use Apple in my free time]

Next Steps (Apple & Windows Users)

Ok so if all went well above you should now have 2000 contacts at the very end of your iPhone contact list, all of which should have the same phone number. [Remember it doesn't matter if you have the 2000 z-contacts in a sub-folder or not]

That was all I needed to do, the next time it paired with my iDrive (2006 BMW M5) the contacts list appeared after a short wait HOWEVER, some people have said it’s best to keep the iPhone from sleeping whilst waiting for the initial sync to happen and some have said they had to delete the iPhone-BMW pairing and re-pair, so lets be safe and do both.

Delete the pairing – On you iPhone go to Settings->General->Bluetooth and if you see BMW##### [where there #'s are the last 5 digits of your car's chasis number in case you didn't know that] click it and select unpair. Now go to your iDrive (or prof radio if you don’t have iDrive) and select info sources/settings and find the bluetooth page (it differs depending on software version, etc but I’m sure you know where it is) and delete any pairings for any phones you have in there to be safe. Now go through the whole re-pairing procedure again, I will try and post a video on how to do this with iDrive as a few have asked but until then just follow the manual.

NOTE – If you find your iPhone contantly connects and drops the connection via bluetooth then you may have another problem for which I don’t have a solution just yet.

Keep the iPhone awake – Once you have paired the car will try and connect with the iPhone and sync the contacts, if you go to the communications tab of the iDrive (push and hold up on the iDrive controller for 2 seconds) and try and browse A-Z it will probably say “Please wait” with a little clock. Now here’s what some say is important, whilst that is showing you need to open the contacts app on your iphone and just sit there scrolling the contacts up and down randomly to simply keep the phone from entering sleep mode.

Wait a few minutes (up to 5mins lets say)…..DONE?

Did it work for you? Your comments are much appreciated on this matter and many others reading this thread may benefit from knowing what combination of iPhone, software version, model, year, etc you have.

Good luck!

I was recently asked or help with a problem opening links from emails in Outlook Express. It seemed that clicking web/url links in an email didn’t open the default browser and load the page, it just did nothing.

 Fortunately there was an easy fix [for those using Internet Explorer as their default browser at least]: 

1. Click on the Start button in the lower left corner
2. Near the bottom right of the Start Menu you should see “Run…”, click that
   [This should then bring up a black window with some text in?]
3. In that window type the following (without the quotation marks)
   "REGSVR32 URLMON.DLL"
once you have typed the above in hit return key.
4. A small window should popup saying
   “DLLREGISTERSERVER in urlmon.dll succeeded”
   Click OK in this popup window.
5. You can now close the black window that opened up after Step 2.
6. Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools in the top menu and then select Internet Options from the list.
7. Once it has opened the internet options pages, along the top you should see various tabs, click on the tab called “Programs”
8. There should be an option in there to check that Internet Explorer is the default browser. If it is ticked, untick it, hit apply then re-tick and hit apply again. If it is not ticked just tick it and hit apply. Either way you need this option ticked but if it’s already ticked you need to untick and then retick it to make sure.
9. You may also need to click on the “Advanced tab” and see if there is an option to reset internet explorer settings at the bottom, if so click that too and hit ok to close the settings pages.

Now reboot the computer, once rebooted try opening Internet Explorer first and if it prompts you that it is not the default web browser you should click yes to make it default. Next open Outlook Express and see if that has solved the problem with the links in emails.

Method 1 – Create from Scratch

Right click on the desktop and select New -> Shortcut:

You will then be asked for the location of the item for the shortcut. Ordinarily you would just type http://the_url_you_want/ here but that would cause the page to open in your system’s default browser which is not what you want. Instead, copy and paste one of the following depending which browser you want to force the shortcut to open in:

To force open a URL in Internet Explorer:
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” http://url_you_want

To force open a URL in Firefox:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” http://url_you_want

After copying the blue text above you simply past that into the item location field, replacing the “url_you_want” with your chosen url. For example, if you had firefox set as your default browser but wanted to have a shortcut to http://blog.scoopz.com/ that always opened in Internet Explorer it would look like:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://blog.scoopz.com

Method 2 – Modify a shortcut to the browser

What if you want to open in a browser other than IE or Firefox (Opera or Safari, etc). You can acieve the same result as Method 1 by first creating a shortcut to the browser program itself and then modifying this shortcut to include the URL or web page you want.

Click on Start, Programs and find the browser you wish to use. Click and drag the icon for the browser to the desktop from the Programs menu whilst holding down the CTRL key.

You should now have a shortcut to the browser on your desktop. In this example I have chosen Internet Explorer (see icon to the left).

Next right click on the shortcut you just created and select properties from the popup menu. This should then load the shortcut’s properties page.

All you need to do now is click on the target field in the properties page and scroll to the very end (or hit the End Key on the keyboard). You now need to type the URL that you wish to open at the end of this field, in the example to the right I have chosen http://blog.scoopz.com and appended this to the end of the target. Leave all the other settings the same for now and that’s the new shortcut done.

From this shortcut page you can easily choose a Shortcut Key combination (CTRL+ALT+B, etc) to launch your shortcut instantly and choose whether to open the web page in a maximised, minimised or normal sized window.

UPDATE Jan 2010 – As several users have pointed out in the comments, the above techniques do not work if you are running Vista or Windows 7 as the path to internet explorer EXE file has changed. In this case or if you want to apply the above to other browsers here’s what Xygris recommends:

For those with other browsers, different operating systems or just updated versions with different paths try just copying the shortcut from your start menu to your desktop (via drag & drop) and them appending the new shortcut with the URL.

Thanks for the heads up Xygris.

I checked the BT HomeHub and the broadband light and LAN lights were on but I rebooted the hub just for good measure.

I then connected my iPhone to the hub via wi-fi and it was instantly online so no problem with the broadband connection itself and access to google.com and hotmail.com was fine.

The ethernet cable from the router to the computer was seated correctly, the XP machine had picked up an IP properly from the router’s DHCP, it all seemed ok.

I tried accessing bbc.co.uk just in case it was a caching error and to my surprise it loaded the page without delay.  After trying a few others, skynews.com, digg.com, etc I established it was just a handful of sites affected.

Rather than the usual, “just give it a reboot” I wanted to see if I could find a fix without restarting. Since almost all site except ones used regularly on that machine were working it had to be some sort of DNS or cacheing issue. I’d tried emptying internet explorer’s cache and relaunching IE7 which had not effect. I then found firefox hiding on the system and never used so I tried that and same problem, so it wasn’t a program specific cache it was a global cache somewhere on the machine and there appeared to be a very easy fix, just clearing the local DNS cache from the command prompt.

Simply open up a command prompt window (windows key+R, then type “cmd” and hit return). Once in command prompt just type:

ipconfig /flushdns

This will clear any local DNS cache which Windows XP has created to speed up access to some sites you have recently visited. After flushing the DNS Internet Explorer opened google.com and MSN Live messenger signed in without a hitch and no need to restart either You can edit your Windows registry and set the local DNS to never cache or have a much shorter cache refresh period but I didn’t bother in this case.

I know this is common knowledge to a lot of people but it should serve as warning when testing for an internet connection, don’t simply try to access google.com, or some other well known site that may be in a corrupt local dns cache. It’s the first time I’ve been caught out by it and it’ll certainly be my last.

Luckily there was a nice easy fix:

1. Quit Outlook
2. Click Start->Run
3. Type “outlook /cleanreminders” without the quotes and hit OK.
4. Outlook will then launch after cleaning any corrupt appointments.
5. Quit Outlook again.
6. Click Start->Run
7. Type “outlook /cleanfreebusy” without the quotes and hit OK.
8. Outlook will then launch after cleaning any corrupt free/busy slots.
9. That’s it.

4 of my employees had this problem with Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2003. The above fix worked first time for all of them.