How long does it take you to sync your iphone 3GS w/computer using XP?

Do you have pics or vids on the phone that were taken on the phone? If so, copy them off to your computer and sync them back.

Have you tried restarting the phone?
When was the last time you rebooted the PC?
Have you tried a different USB port?

I wouldn't let the "horror" stories you read on the forums prevent you from upgrading to the latest iOS. If you refuse to upgrade because users in the forums have problem, you will NEVER upgrade.

Fix your syncing issue, then upgrade. If you have problems, deal with it. If you don't, congrats, like 98% of all users, you upgraded without issues.

I have a real fast chip set, it took about 15 minutes from 3.1 to 4.0, I have about 18 gigs of pics on my phone and run XP

With iTunes 8 I would have 10 hour or lonnger backups. With iTunes 9 I usually run 15 to 25 minutes total time connected.

pamiela54 wrote:
... when I try and back up and sync my phone, it takes forever. Yesterday, after 2 hours it was still on step 1 of 6 on backing up...

Transfer issues are caused most likely by the amount of data to transfer or your USB connection or both.

iTunes backups will be a lot faster if you backup data that is synced with iTunes itself. I mean, if you have loads of photos on your phone but all of them are not sync with iTunes, backup will need copy them. If photo are in sync, backup just needs to record photo location and not all photo's data, because data is in iTunes too. This happens with apps, too, and is helpful with large apps, as example TomTom-like navigators.

The other bottleneck is USB. If your ports are USB 1.0 and NOT 2.0, they are slow as a crawl to transfer data. Only way to fix that is hardware upgrade.

Then, a lot of other things can go in between, as example your antivirus messing with the data transfer to check for viruses, just to say one. You can check the iTunes CPU usage on activity manager to see if something goes there and eats up CPU.

HTH, Andrea