Question: I'm a big fan of Motorola's PhoneTools software, and I've used it for a while on Windows XP to copy pictures from my phone to my PC. I recently upgraded to Vista though, and now PhoneTools won't recognize my phone. What's the trick to getting it to work?

Answer: I've also used PhoneTools for quite a while and would say it's my hands-down favorite program for connecting my wife's RAZR V3 phone to our laptop, so we can copy pictures and ring tones between the laptop and her phone (and vice versa).

I was able to get it running on Vista but first I had to download and install the Motorola USB Driver v3.5.0 for Windows (32-bit) to get it working on Vista.

Motorola makes you create an account, which always drives me nuts, so I downloaded it and saved it on my web server so at least you won't have to create an account. You can get the Vista RAZR drivers here without having to create an account.

Once you download and install the driver, then you'll be able to run PhoneTools and it will recognize your RAZR phone on Vista with a USB data cable or Bluetooth connection:

Once you're connected you'll see the main PhoneTools control panel, which looks like a fully-opened RAZR phone.

From there you can click Multimedia Studio to view the handy file transfer feature that lets you copy multiple photos, videos, and ring tones between your phone and your computer.

Don't have PhoneTools yet? Be sure to get it from an authorized reseller instead of directly from Motorola. It's $39.95 directly from Motorola, but you can get it for about half that from Wireless Emporium (authorized reseller).

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