Inverse Karma

A good amount of IK readers own Nokia phones, and many of them also use the accompanying Nokia PC Suite. It is a great piece of software of course, but have you noticed it adding a ‘Nokia Phone Browser’ icon in your My Computer that you can’t just get rid of?

Wait.. Why get rid of it? Most new phones are also added as portable devices (both Winamp and WMP 12 detect my 5610 as a portable music player!) and can display files on both phone memory and your memory card. So why keep an extra icon hanging around, like in the screenshot below? Simply unregistering a DLL will do the trick. Open up Command Prompt by typing in cmd in Start->Run. At the prompt, type the following commands.

cd\
cd progra~1
cd nokia
cd nokiap~1
regsvr32 /u phonebrowser.dll

To restore the Phone Browser, just substitute the last line with the following command.

regsvr32 phonebrowser.dll

regsvr32 is responsible for registering DLL files on your Windows machine. The /u switch uninstalls a DLL reference. Once you are done, you should get a message as shown in the second screenshot.

To make it even more ridiculously simple, I’ve just added batch scripts to remove and restore the phone browser icon. All you have to do it double-click the first file to remove it, and the second to restore it, should you change your mind.

       Download remove-nokia.bat
       Download restore-nokia.bat

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