Solved: TweetDeck Not Working on a New Computer

Got a brand-spanking new HP Pavillion laptop this week. Because I spend a large part of my day on Twitter, I use lots of tools such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite. With my old HP laptop, the desktop application version of TweetDeck always worked exactly as I hoped. With my new laptop, not so lucky. Here’s what I experienced, what I tried, and what I eventually did as a reluctant solution.

I installed the TweetDeck desktop application and entered my username and password. At first I thought everything was going fine when my columns all appeared just as they were on my old computer. Then I realized that only my Facebook columns were working. None of my Twitter columns ever populated with data. I tried sending a tweet from one of my accounts, but I was greeted with the no-so-helpful message: “Failed: Sending update to Twitter.”

I thought that maybe I just needed to delete and re-add my columns. So I deleted a column and went to re-add it. Doing so, I noticed that all of my Twitter accounts names were labeled “Unknown.” Further, when I went to add a new account, all I saw was a blank screen where I should have seen the screen to input my account’s login info.

Thus I embarked on my journey to figure this out. In the end, I’m moderately satisfied with the results, but here are the things I tried, based on scouring forums for solutions… It should be noted that my experience is based on a Windows 7 system. My apologies to the Mac users out there, but perhaps some of this may help you as well.

Ran the program as an administrator
I read a couple of different variants on this one. First, I read that the user account running TweetDeck needed to be an administrator. Mine already was. Second, I read that I needed to right-click the app, go into the properties->Compatibility and select “Run this program as an administrator.” Did it, and it still didn’t work. Next!

Make sure Flash is installed on your system
I was pretty sure that I had already installed Flash, but just to be safe, I went and installed again anyway. Still didn’t help.

Uninstall and Re-install TweetDeck
Since I had just installed it, this seemed like I was grasping at straws, but you never know. So I uninstalled TweetDeck, deleted the install file, and started over. After downloading and re-installing, I received the exact same errors.

Check the Firewall
I thought for sure this was the problem. It would make sense that TweetDeck was probably being blocked by my firewall settings, right? After tinkering around with settings, I eventually just turned my firewall off completely, and the same errors persisted.

Internet Security
Some have claimed that programs like Norton Internet Security might cause problems with the TweetDeck app. I never enabled it, so that isn’t the problem here.

Windows Update
Because my laptop is new, I thought I might need to update some crucial files that the TweetDeck application needed. After installing something like 38 updates and restarting, TweetDeck still didn’t work properly.

Install Chrome
Since the web-based version of Tweetdeck only works with the Chrome browser (on a PC), I thought maybe there was something in that browser that would help the desktop application work correctly. It didn’t.

Final Solution: Web-Based Chrome
My “solution” ended up being that I threw in the towel on the desktop application completely. Once I found that  running the web-based version of TweetDeck on Chrome was almost exactly the same experience as the desktop application – and it worked, I decided not to waste anymore time on the desktop application. I will probably still periodically check the desktop version of TweetDeck, after new versions or Windows updates, but the web-based Chrome solution at least puts me back in action. Perhaps by the time the desktop version ever gets fixed, I’ll be so used to the Chrome solution that I won’t care anymore. You can run the web-based version of TweetDeck at web.tweetdeck.com.

If you’re having the same issues, tweet us @wafflesatnoon for any solutions you may have found. And to you trolls out there, this isn’t meant to be a Hootsuite vs TweetDeck discussion. I use both on a daily basis and like both of them very much. I’m just trying to help out any TweetDeck users who may have encountered the same problem.

Good luck!