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Q: I have a Samsung Pro 9000 Tablet which works great except for one thing. It will not open attachments sent from the new iPhones. Attachments sent from other devices work fine. Has there been a change in how the attachments are sent from iPhones? Most of the attachments that have failed are small attachments sent in jpeg.

– Jack H.
Shalimar, Florida

A:  As I am not a regular user of Android, this was one of those questions for which I had to go and do quite a bit of research, rather than relying on personal knowledge.  Potential answers were so elusive that I almost chose not to use your question, Jack. (That, and the fact that you didn’t provide me with any contact information except your e-mail address.)

Most of my research turned up nothing but users complaining about this problem, and further complaining that nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Some claim that it is related to one specific data provider, in those cases AT&T, but that seems like it’s not the case.  Quite a few of the complaints I read were about text/SMS messaging, and I realized that your e-mail never explicitly said e-mail, and the word “attachments” could be interpreted to mean either e-mail or SMS messaging.  However, the more common use is e-mail, so I opted to take that route.

My research finally revealed a handful of possible solutions. Some speculated that the image simply had not finished downloading yet, and said that if you keep scrolling to the bottom, you will find a spinning circle indicating the pending download.  It is possible that such downloads would be blocked when you are using data on the provider network rather than WiFi. Several users discovered that the device’s e-mail app was having difficulty writing to the external SD card.  Their solution was to unmount and remount their external SD card.  To try this, go under Settings->More…->Storage, and find the external card.

If none of these problems help you, Jack, I’m afraid I’m at a loss. Perhaps one of my other readers is an Android Geek and has some knowledge to share?  If so, log onto ItsGeekToMe.co and comment on today’s article.

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Q: First I want to applaud you for that fantastic Christmas light display ( It has to be a lot of work!!!!) Thank you! And now my problem: My desktop PC went bad, so I took it to the Geeks at Best Buy, they told me that it would be too expensive to repair, so I bought a new one. Since they had replaced the HDD not too long before that I bought an external 3.5″ HD enclosure, USB 2.0 interface to retrieve my old files from it, but to my surprise most of my files were missing: Pictures, document, etc.  Is this normal or should I blame them?

– Carol O.
Freeport, Florida

A: Thanks for the kind words about the Geek Lights on the Corner, Carol.  I hope you’re tuned into the show’s Facebook page, because I’m about to publicly announce some massive changes coming to the show for Season 9!  Check it out at tinyURL.com/GeekLights.

Missing files are never what I would consider “normal”. However, the files may not actually be missing, but instead are located on the drive other than where you expect them to be.  When a PC is booted from a hard disk, certain locations on that disk are treated as “special” by Windows.  The physical folder of these special locations aren’t normally displayed in the navigation bar of your file browser.  I’m talking about directories like My Documents, My Pictures, etc. – coincidentally (not really) the locations where the files you’re asking about would have lived.

When a drive is just a drive, and is not the device from which Windows boots, these locations lose their “special” characteristics and you must access them by their explicit path name. What that is depends on the user who is signed in to the computer.  Let’s assume the username in your case is “Carol”.  The path to the document files would be C:\Users\Carol\Documents\.  Of course, replace “C:” with whatever drive letter the system has assigned to the drive in the external housing.

One final word: I would head back over to Best Buy and ask your salesperson just exactly what he or she was thinking selling you an external drive housing with a USB 2.0 interface. That could really bottleneck that drive, since USB 2.0 data transfer speeds top out at about 60 megabytes per second, where your drive may be capable of data transfer rates of 300 megabytes per second.  They should have sold you one that was at least USB 3.0, which has a data transfer rate up to 640 megabytes per second – over 10 times faster than USB 2.0.

Tags: Android, Attachments, Geek Lights on the Corner, GLOTC, iPhone, Special Folders