My iPhone makes my computer blue screen

So, I get a call from a friend of mine..

"Hey, Craige, I got one of those new iPhones. They're awesome you should come and check it out!"

"Yeah, no worries mate, I'll come round this week and take a look at it."

The phone's quite cool looking, and runs pretty good...that is until I connect it to his computer to sync his contacts.

When I connect the phone the computer bluescreens and dumps to memory. So what can I try? Here's some ideas.

• Try the iPhone in Safe Mode
  
• Test the USB ports
  
• Replace the driver files
  
• Reload the iPhone
  
• Test the iPhone in a different computer
  

To make things as easy as possible we need to isolate the problem and by trying these above we should be able to work out what's wrong.

1. Test the USB ports. Any other devices that you might have that run on USB, these days that is virtually everything that connects to a computer, can be used to test the USB ports. Plug them into the same port and see what happens. If you can use the device then we can, for now, assume that the USB ports are working fine. I had a USB flash memory drive that i connected and it came up all good. NEXT...

2. Test the phone in a different computer. If you have another computer at your place you can plug the device into it and see if you can use it as normal. In this case, if you connect it and can use it then we can assume, again for now, that the iPhone is working fine and is all in order. If the device and computer play up again, we would be almost certain that the iPhone is faulty and would need to be returned. Luckily I had my laptop, and connected the iPhone which came up fine and working. So, it's not the iPhone. NEXT...

3. Try the phone in Safe Mode. Safe Mode runs without loading as many drivers or applications on startup, so if one of these is causing a problem with the device i will be able to view it in safe mode. In this case I can. You can access the startup items when in 'Normal' mode by going to Start -> Run -> and typing in 'msconfig'. Click on the 'Startup' tab and it will show me a list of some applications that start when Windows boots. If I untick an item it will not load next time the computer starts up, but don't worry we can always turn it back on. I removed everything from startup, restarted the computer and still the computer crashed with a blue screen. Now that the fault is still occurring I need to go 'deeper underground' as it were and look at the drivers. NEXT...

4. Reload the iPhone. I'm not sure if any of you have installed the iPhone, but it doesn't come with a driver disk. You can just plug it in, and in a perfect world, it will install and be ready for you to use in iTunes. so, I can hardly reinstall the software without reinstalling Windows, which I don't want to do at this point. NEXT...

5. Replace the driver files. ALL devices need a file to make them run properly, this file is called a driver. You can see what drivers a device is using by going to the Device Manager, selecting the device and looking through the properties. I look at the driver information under the iPhone and see a file name that I don't recognise. Let's GOOGLE this file and see what comes up, and it turns out that it's a file that is used by Logitech hardware. I decided to uninstall all the Logitech software from Add/Remove programs in hope to remove the driver and see if I can install the iPhone again. VIOLA! The iPhone doesn't cause the system to bluescreen anymore! Our result was that it was either a corrupt or incorrect driver causing the system to play up.

With the device now correctly installed and working properly we can move on to syncing the iPhone with the Outlook contacts on the computer.