Tales from the Crypto

Alun-

You're running Vista.  You've already got about 60G of worthless stuff that you can't uninstall-- like Internet Exploder!  Sure, given it's smaller initial installed base and the popularity of the iPod and iTunes, Apple has chosen in this case to act precisely as slimy as Microsoft.. but I'm amazed that 20 years later you still give MS a pass while bitching about Apple!

Really, look at the momentum, its time for you to defect:

ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z

If you do, I promise, I'll never say "I told you so."  Not once.  Ok, well, only once. :-)

Oh well, I'll still gladly buy you a pint sometime if you'd let me... I'll even come over to the eastside.

Jay

wow, i still am unsure how to rid myself of the ofensive itunes but i liked the speeding quote and it reminded me of "even if you prove me crazy, it doesn't mean your sane."  it often comes to mind when I think of the Apple/MS debates.  I recently bought another Apple because I needed to sync my iphone and wanted to run Filemaker 9 on a true mother ship.  several thousand dollars later, the iphone won't sync with ical, the escalated service people are baffled and sent it to engineering, which has steadfastly ignored the issue for weeks, and Filemaker, wholly owned by Apple will not play well with Leopard.  I'm  not at all hopeful.  Aleopard never changes it spots and all.  I'm old enough to remember my old Apples and the problems are much like those days, so they look cool but are still fraught with problems.  MS is a study in how to become a monopoly while never producing a complete quality product.  But it does run Filemaker pretty well.  

Alunj, you're too funny.  I don't have time to play with apple toyz either.

There's a fix for Apple Software Update, you know. Start ASU. Leave a check mark beside the applications you do NOT want to be prompted for in the future. Click Tools, Ignore Selected Updates.

When you run Apple Software Update in the future, you'll see available updates for only those programs you left unchecked.

Alun, you are dead-on.  All my 'Apple' friends constantly tell me how good their systems are, but I find their arguments a little flimsy.  For instance, I cannot stand Quicktime, but I have to have it to view their videos that they send me.  And every time I configure it NOT to start at system boot, it comes back to haunt me everytime!  I finally have to edit the registry to keep it out of my System Tray!

Their IPOD?  Hey, I bought a 30GB Zune for half the price and it works just as well as their players.  (Actually I got it free from the MS store!  :)

About the only thing I find good about Apple is their commercials.  Too bad they are more 'exaggeration' than truth.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and everyone have a safe and Happy New Year!

William Pecht

MVP - MS Networking

etc., etc.

Why not just uninstall the "Apple Software Update" application?  That will cure your Apple update issues and remove yet another application that thinks it needs to start with your system eating up resources in the guise of protecting you.  Doing this simply demands that you be aware of updates and manually get them.

And your comments on the Apple "trash can" are spot on!  I've worked with Apple systems for years and find *nothing* intuitive about them.  Most goes contrary to logic.

Usually some programs will not uninstall unless they are completely shut down. Here is what I found out, is that the Apple Mobile Device will start up on its own with out clicking on anything. Go to "cntr" alt del" to bring up the "Windows task manager", go to the "processes" and you will see it running, click on it and select "end process",,,  wait a little bit and it will start right back up again..... keep the window open,,,,

 Go to the "remove programs" section in the Control Panel" where you will find Apple Mobile device" about 35 Meg in size,,,,

 end the process, anmd immediately go to remove the program,,,, go back to the Task Manager and ensure it does not come back on again......

 If successful, it should be removed for good!

Coffeelover,,,,,,,,,

Justement moi j'ai une question un peu contraire a ce que vous dites vu que en faite j'aimerais bien demarrer apple mobile device.. j'vient d'avoir un itouch et itunes ne le reconnait pas parce que apple moble device est pas demarré... donc voila si vous m'aider .. merci

Okay, I've been trying to remove this software from my computer for several hours now with no success. It starts the install both ways, but hangs up at some point, forcing me to end the uninstall process.

I can't find any reference to this software anywhere at the Apple.com website.

Can someone help me?

I don't like apple because I see their "intuitive" approach as saying user is not intelligent enough to understand files, programs, or what .exe means.  Unfortunately, Vista is following.

Unfortunately, some programs, like Adobe Premiere movie editor requires Quicktime.

Q.  What is the purpose of Mobile Device Support?  Does to relate to Quicktime, iTunes, or ipod or none of the above??

Thank you! I was having trouble removing that Apple Mobile Device Support thing : )

Just to follow up;  using control panel, remove programs; I selected the apple mobile and the remove instruction. That did it.

To be sure, used search for any trace of Apple Mobile device.  only thing left was the installer hiding in "documents and settings/all users/application data/apple/installation cache"

Just selected and deleted those.  all clean now.

still didn't solve my interference problem, but I feel better.

I have a iPod Nano with video now.  You can uninstall the Apple Mobile Device service without it affecting iTunes.  I also managed to uninstall the apple updater.  I should mention I have iTunes on a Windows Media Center computer (XP not Vista).  I won't let iTunes anywhere near my Vista laptop :)

I got a Vista comp from someone, and it had 2 Apple programs on it, one of which was the MDS.  Surprisingly, I didn't have any issues uninstalling it...went easily.

However, the second program was some kind of Apple Data something-or-other program.  I tried the uninstall routine, twice, and it froze both times, first time at 50%, and the second time at "1 second" to completion.  

I rebooted my comp after both situations, and gave up trying to uninstall it.  Vista started acting a little funky, but didn't seem serious.  So, I moved on to installing another piece of software, and it crashed mid-installation with BSOD.  I reboot a few times, and each time Vista degrades more and more, until it eventually won't boot at all (just goes black screen).  

After screwing around with my Vista install/recovery CD, doing the repair routine, it turns out the registry hive was corrupted and had to get rolled back.  I did so, and on a whim (just to confirm) decided to try uninstalling the Apple Data thing one more time.  Sure enough, Vista started screwing up, and I had to repair the registry hive again using the cd.

So, several issues here...1) Apple's lame program has a crap uninstall procedure, 2) it's so crap it can screw up the OS, 3) It's the 21st century and we're on the 6th iteration of Windows, but still Vista can't recover anymore gracefully from situations like this (IE: I would assume that on booting, Vista would notice it's reg is corrupted, tell me, and ask if I want to keep going or roll-back to a good version.  Nope.  Instead, it lets you boot as if nothing's wrong and progressively blows up until you can't boot and have to repair using the cd.  That's pretty pathetic.)

Apple sucks, Microsoft sucks, blah blah blah...  I find it odd that you're complaining about something you installed (apple software updater - it asks if you want it) with an option to not bug you about products you don't have, and the option to not load at startup (reg editing? run msconfig) in order to update a product originally developed for another OS (Mac OS X) and proted to a different OS that's bloated, slow, buggy, and lacking support in its own right.  For the record, I haven't used a Mac in years; I'm writing this from Windows XP x64 (Microsoft's finest OS so far IMO - and talk about lack of support, it's years later and I STILL have to pray for drivers for big name products).  Yeah, Apple's stuff sometimes runs poorly on windows - iTunes in particular is slow and buggy.  But it runs great on Macs, which are, after all, the primary focus of Apple.  Don't want iTunes?  Don't get an iPod.  Don't want QuickTime?  Don't use it (if you absolutely MUST see that super-important QuickTime video, get just the CODECs with QuickTime Alternative; but in all honesty, I have more trouble configuring my apps to use the proper DirectShow filters in the proper order than I ever had with QuickTime).  Finally, you're COMPLAINING that you can uninstall many applications simply by deleting their folders, without the need to delve into the murky waters of ApplicationData and other system folders or a nearly incomprehensible registry system?  I'm amazed.  The Mac OS is certainly different, but there's really no denying that it runs much more smoothly and responsively on worse hardware than does Vista.  It's a cleaner, slimmer OS.  But it is different and it's not perfect.  It would be great if Apple could make both the Mac OS AND Windows run better, but that seems a little unreasonable.

I've just spent 14 hours -- count em! -- trying to install an iTouch. The reason I'm responding to this topic is that all but 3 minutes of those 14 hours was spent dealing with Apple Mobile Device Support crap. First, there was apparently an older version of my system and we couldn't get it to uninstall. Apple Tech Support had to follow my lead to figure out that I needed to use the Windows Install Clean-up Utility. That got rid of the older version -- but nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing could be done to get the NEW version to install. We even fat-fingered it (at the Apple "Genius" desk at my local store) to try and force the system to see it. As reported here, the stupid program would start to install (it's the first of three "programs" that are installed when you install the latest version of iTunes) and then it would rollback, deleting the files it had copied under \program files\common files\apple\mobile device support. I can't tell you the tricks we went through to try and prevent it from deleting the files.

I can tell you though that I learned two things from this: (1) you can download a version of Quicktime WITHOUT iTunes attached to it (I believe the address was www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime) and (2) I'll stay away from Apple's sexy new products since they can't seem to get them to work.

i call bullshit on anyone who is trying to compare the itunes virus to windows' bundled software. i don't use iexplorer cause i know better.  so when i DON'T use it, it stays put without popping it's ugly head without warning.  itunes on the other hand keeps popping back up like a drunk after getting kicked out of a party.  if you don't believe me, open up your task manager and kill  "applemobiledeviceservice.exe" and wait about 30 seconds.... wait for it.... HEY!  there it is!  i didn't open itunes or plugged in my ipod but hey, it wants to party!  i don't really care about apple's catholic way of blessing us with their logic on my macbook (since i chose to buy it and understand how apple works) but this is one egg short of a virus on my pc.  BULLSHIT!!!

thanks man, been looking for this fix for awhile now. yes apple sucks, talk about a proprietory bunch of crap, buy a ipod player you have to buy itunes or convert your current library to mp4 which thay dont offer to convert back to use in any other player, basiclly i feel thay have stole my rights to my music. now thats crappy.

Well, seems like apple and microsoft are in a equal low state position right now. People used to say apple pc's were better, but every new day I see something worst. Vista was not a smart option for microsoft, but at least it ain't apple :D

Hope that doesn't happen with Linux tho...

Hmmmm.  I run Outlook and I had to close it before I could uninstall Apple Mobile Device Support.  I'm guessing that's because I might be synching Outlook with the iPhone THAT I DON'T HAVE!  At least it uninstalled without issue.

For Jay -

What's wrong with this picture?  Simple.  If Microsoft is a monopoly and it uses hardware that is open source, then Apple has to be a mega-monopoly with it's closed source hardware.

If a company wants to go into the video card business and make cards and drivers for Windows, no problem.  Microsoft can't stop them.  If the card and drivers are garbage, the free market will weed them out.

On the other hand, if you want to make ANY piece of hardware for a Mac, you have to get approval from the great god Apple.  If you want to write a SOFTWARE application for the Mac you have to get approval from Apple as well.  

Basically, Apple is a huge monopoly that plays the "little ol' home grown company" card very well.  Law suits by Apple Music (The Beatles) and Cisco (they had the name "iPhone" first) come to mind.  Please stop lauding the VIRTUES of Apple. They are a company like any other trying to be profitable.

Knock off the "holier than thou" attitude when talking about Apple.

Make sure to remember to remove Apple's crap networking piece, Bonjour, that installs with itunes as well.

It shows up in Add/Remove programs in Windoez.

If you don't want to run Quicktime (as well as RealPlayer), there is a good player which is freeware and will run all files like a breeze. It's also light and unobstrusive. Try it, you will like it.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

It took me about 30 minutes to remove the Apple Mobile Device Support out of Windows XP.  It's domineering though that XP almost couldn't do anything, like a patient being operated on a major surgery.  It freezed on several minutes, but I had to wait, read something else while waiting for it to finish uninstalling.  It did, but there was no message telling that it was completely uninstalled.  What a crappy software Apple insiduously offers to MS users.

As I have mentioned in other posts ( Retro-bundling - another suck of the Apple , MacBook Air debuts;