so after a few atempts kies decides to recognize i have my phone connected and the message pops up new firmware upgrade available, loverly i thought maybe it will quicken it up abit, so i click it and it backs up my contacts, great all going well. click upgrade from jk3 to jm1 so i did, but thats were it stops and comes up with the error message "firmware update cannot be proceed, will now close " can crashes my laptop. im have an unlocked from on t mobile. any one else had this?

Reading other threads this is a known problem with kies and has been for sometime, think it's about time samsung did something about this problem.

So its just kies being rubbish, agreed samsung need to sort it wish kies was as stable as nokia suite never had any big issues with that

same things been happening with me. im going to reinstall kies now because i deleted it. try again x

This is an issue for me too. Some people suggest using Odin, in order to manually flash the phone yourself (on the verge of doing so myself, but if you don't want to, I get the impression the updates come through eventually over the air...)

I did see a solution, which worked for some even if not for myself. If you have Kies installed, make sure it is set not to auto open when the galaxy is connected, and kill any of its processes in Task Manager. Then navigate to Program Files (or Program Files x86) -> Samsung and run MSC.Thunder.Firmwareupdate.exe, then connect your phone and it may well work (i.e. dont open Kies, just that module).