Okay. I have tried this solution and so far,  it’s been working for the past 3 times I sync-ed and back-ed up.

For those wondering what the problem was, in summary, every freakin’ time I tried to sync my iPhone 3GS with my new Win 7 Lenovo Y550P machine, iTunes would do one solid back-up afterwhich it will refuse to recognize the iPhone again. The frequency of recognition was about once every 20 or so times I plug and unplug the iPhone from the cable that’s connected to the PC.

It was literally wasting my weekends since I would be huddled in front of the PC trying to trouble-shoot the damn iPhone.

Anyhow, I found the solution through one of the older forum posts found here and here.

In summary, I flashed the bios on the Y550p and so far the iPhone has been recognized as both a phone and a camera device. I have been able to do backups without losing data and I can finally change the songs on my playlist. Thanks to Lenovo for providing the update.

Still no credit as all to Apple for ignoring this issue and for making the iPhone so god-damn freaking difficult to use.