Question Frozen screen on PC when mobile phone or USB external drive is connected ?

[hondoman]

Right then,

how many times have I encountered this over the decades...? Connect a mobile phone or external drive to a PC, open File Explorer, attempt to copy a file or group of files and the screen on the PC freezes. Drives me right batty!

Currently, I have a rather old Samsung XCover 4 phone and am attempting to pull off all the old photos for a mate and there are loads. The phone has Android v9. I attempted to update it, but it seems v9 is the final compatible update for this old phone. My PC has 16GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 5 2600X Six-Core Processor 3.60 GHz, Win11Pro.

It would seem that when transferring the files, the mobile cannot keep up with the PC and causes the screen freeze. Could that be it? Is there a means to fix this? My mate wants to keep these photos and I'm doing my best.

Ideas?

 

[Ralston18]

Have you tried other known working transfer cables between PC and the Android?

Or tried connecting the Android to other known working PC's?

= = = =

On the PC look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for any error codes that occur just before or at the time of the screen freezes.

Any given error can be clicked for more details. The details may or may not be helpful.

Reliability History is much more user friendly so start there.

Event Viewer takes much more time and effort.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3128616/windows-event-viewer.html

In any case the error codes, warnings, or even informational events that correspond with the freezes can be researched.

However, be very leery about any downloads, registry edits,etc.. that claim to solve the problem. Some of those will show up no matter what problem is being addressed.

And there are other options that can help discover the problem:

Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Process Explorer may reveal a potential culprit.

Something changes, PC freezes.

But the problem could indeed originate in the Android or be the Android itself.

TBD.

 

[hondoman]

@Ralston18 thanks for responding. Found a work-round. I took the SD card out and used a USB card reader. All files copied over. I did a bit of cleaning on the Samsung, but it did nothing. For reasons I cannot seem to fathom, I was using a rather high-end USB cable in a 2.0 USB port. I switched over to a 3.0 USB port and Bob's your uncle! All files transfered off the old rubbish phone and are now on a PC.

Now on to his old iPhone6. This should prove fun. Not!

 

[Ralston18]

Interesting. Nicely done.

As for the cables and ports - who knows....

USB 3.0 is backwards compatible and should work with USB 2.0. Could have been some other glitch or gremlin.

As for the iPhone6 - we are still using two of them via Consumer Cellular. (Upgrades pending....)

The best way I have found to transfer photographs is to use a cable between iphone and computer USB port. Phone appears as a drive and I simply copy the photographs to a folder on the PC. Bluetooth often failing to pair and/or connect.

Cable has been problematic a couple of times but I get it to work without too much hassle.

Remember you may also be able to upload the photographs to Apple's storage - even if you do not really want to make use of the free storage. Simply another means to have backup copies somewhere else.

Just in case.....

 

[hondoman]

Interesting. Nicely done.

Cheers!