more phones and a new laptop on the way

finally starting to get back on my feet after the robery...
my new 3gs just arrived and im working on a few other phones for people currently.
An issue i have come across lately though is 2 phones same room at the same time with the same carrier (in this case vodafone) one has good service say 3 bars and the other has nothing. very strange ive tried with a different dock etc and checked all the chassis connection points in one case. has anyone else had this issue before?

itunes keeps crashing on sync

can anyone tell me what the deal is with itunes crashing when syncing with my phone ?
ive tried various restarts of both my computer and my iphone and it still just crashes at random parts of the sync process... its only itunes that locks up everything else runs perfectly ok... its driving me nuts because its on my phone. if it was a customers phone id just sit it aside have something to eat and come back later but its my phone and i want it now..

downgrade from 4.0.1

the solution i have is dont go to 3.1.3 as i have been trying it keeps coming up saying incompatable file... how ever 3.1.2 works just fine. i still ran into some minor issues along the way but heres the deal.

the phone i was working on at the time is a iphone 3g 16 gig which was locked out in a way i ahvent seen before... some american thing where you can use the phone with out the right sim card installed basically. due to this it had some other issues aswell and forced me to do a restore. stupidly i clicked restore and update pushing it to 4.0.1. phone remained locked out. after many tries pushing it back to 3.1.3 heres what i did..

download a restore file of 3.1.2 and save it some where easy to find (it gets hidden some where in windows thats a bit hard to track down from the itunes window)

turn the phone off completely (theres many vids on you tube showing this process if you would like a visual)

hold power and home as if your doing a restart and hold them for 10 seconds (apparently this should be as close to actual 10 seconds as possible)

after 10 seconds release the power button but continue to hold the home button untill you hear the sound of your computer recognising a USB input.

the screen will remain black this is called DFU mode. itunes will say its recognised a phone in restore mode or something similar.

click ok on the box then you need to hold down shift and click restore a box will open so that you can select the firmware version you wish to use.

once this is done it will again come up in recovery mode. (i just used umbrella to kick it out) you can just restart the phone according to most posts.
i then tried to jailbreak with spirit but it failed i believe due tot he way it was locked to the provider so i tried the same thing with black rain which worked and then proceeded to jailbreak it with spirit also which apears to work fine together.

any videos and information to help you with this is available online and it easy to do once you get your head around it. im posting this because no one seemed to know how to fix the issue i was having.
if you have any problems like this or any questions feel free to contact me on here. ill help how ever i can

error 29 on iphone 3gs

Ive been reading alot of posts on line regarding and error 29 (hardware failure or something similar)although it seems to be only 3gs that does it - thsi may not be the case im going off only what i have read so far - theres been some mention of irecovery being able to make it boot again i just wanted to post that it might also be worth giving "umbrella" a try the "boot out of recovery button has worked wonders for me with similar faults when itunes is finding faults etc.

so beyond over trying to deal with IOS.4.0.1

ive been working on this for a couple of days... there is a very easy way to revert your phone back to 3.1.3... it just doesnt seem to work on any of the phones im trying to do it on. ive watched videos on you tube of people doing it step by step and having it work but it isnt working on my phones it doess everything the same but when you select the firmware version it simply tells me its not valid...

can anyone help me out here

im trying to find an easy way to revert my phone back to either 3.1.3 or 3.1.2 im happy with either... Cydia did have my old shsh files on the system but it seems that between my laptop being stollen and the need to do a full restore on my iphone 3g to get it working again and then re jailbreak it that those files are no longer on file for me... as you can imagine this is causing me endless dramas because 4.0.1 is a complete joke on a 3g.... half my apps dont open and when they do it take 3 or 4 tries to get it right.

4.0 and the ones to follow.....

please dont put them on your iphone 3g....
im playing around now trying to learnt he best ways to revert my iphone 3g back to either 3.1.3 or 3.1.2 seems that windows 7 makes it a bit harder to do.
might have to invest in a mac for doing this sode of things