Preferably Windows (XP or Vista) over USB, because I can't find my bluetooth dongle at the moment, and I could never get it working properly anyway.

Suggestions?

I take it you're saying "Nokia PC Suite" sucks? I tend to agree it can be a pain sometimes.

The only other decent one I know of is Oxygen Phone Manager. Not free though.
http://www.oxygensoftware.com/en/default.asp

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. It's got a whole heap of Windows Explorer shell namespace extensions, almost all of which crash almost every time I try to use them.

It can't be that hard to write something stable. If I could find any documentation about how to write OBEX-over-USB software on Windows, I'd put something together myself.

The problem I'm trying to solve is this: A long time ago, I synchronised my Outlook Contacts and Calendar (including birthdays) to my Nokia 3310, using PC Suite. These have followed me from phone to phone, up to the 6300 that I'm currently using. Now, Outlook puts an 18-hour alarm on birthdays. This is not a problem when you're using Outlook, because they pop up in a window and you can dismiss them easily. Unfortunately, PC Suite synchronised the alarms to the phone, which means I now get woken up at about 6am the day before someone's birthday.

I want to keep the birthdays in the phone, but I want to turn off the alarm. Here's where we get to the stupid part: you can easily turn off the alarm for a birthday, but the act of viewing a repeating appointment makes a copy into the next year, including the alarm settings. This means that I have to remember to delete the alarm on each birthday for multiple years.

Nope. That sucks as well. Doesn't recognise the phone in Nokia mode over USB (doesn't, in fact, support any cable connection other than the crappy Nokia cables, which the 6300 doesn't need); doesn't work with my USB Bluetooth dongle.

OK. I take that back. The latest version didn't crash. Unfortunately, they've taken out the Calendar module, so I had to install Outlook, synchronise with that, edit the birthdays, synchronise back and then uninstall Outlook again.

Okies. I understand some of your frustration. OPM does work with my E61 (and my old 6230) via bluetooth on my laptop and bluetooth via my USB dongle as well as the cable. The PC Suite stuff works fine for me too. It doesn't crash.

I do have a problem where birthdays have seemed to get moved to the previous day during synchronisation (don't know how). Makes you look a bit stupid wishing a happy birthday a day early.

Since I have the E61 and work uses Exchange I'm syncing calendars using Mail for Exchange which generally works OK (except for the birthday thing).

I'm surprised the reminder business doesn't work properly. When viewing the repeating event causes the event to be copied into the next year with an alarm, is that a phone doing that or an Outlook issue?

Is there any way you can export the entries, edit them and import them back?

The philosophical problem I have with PC Suite is that it's mostly implemented as a shell namespace extension. These are difficult to write; they bring down Windows Explorer if they're unstable; and it's complete overkill for managing your Contacts and Calendar on the phone.



It's a phone issue. Until yesterday, my phone hadn't been near Outlook for several years (the contacts and calendar were backed up from the old phone and restored to the new one).



I seem to have fixed it by synchronising to Outlook XP on Windows XP, editing the details there and then synchronising back.

Seems to be working fine now. Thanks for your help.