COR 9: running around in circles, tearing out my hair
9 days to go until start of NaNoWriMo; 1 month until I’m on the plane to Bangkok and I still don’t have a working PDA.
The conversion GUI shareware patch arrived, oh, ten days ago, but it still hasn’t been installed on the two SD cards and tested on a Windows machine. For that matter, nor have my files been transferred onto them.
And then there is the backup issue. Without a full systems backup, I can throw the thing in the bin once the batteries have run out. Judging from the speed with which the 16MB Palm backup card copies, it seems to overwrite all the data on it which suits me just fine, because if there was any conflict with the old ProBackup software, it should have been removed by now. So I back up yet again, delete a small file just to check, and hit ‘restore’. —And flush the whole RAM down the toilet. Again. Time for another hard reset.
This will have to wait, because John is off to work, taking his laptop with him.
Don’t talk to me about laptops.
I’m left to ponder my options while looking at the ‘Preferences’ ‘date and time’ screen which inexplicably pops up, even though nothing else does. Except for the clock. Whatever happens, the clock still works.
So, whatever causes the problem with the card is still there. It may not be possible to remove it either: the Palm backup card is not designed to be tinkered with. Not that I could anyway; this old PC does not have any USB support which I could use for my card reader. I can buy another Palm 16MB backup card (they cost pennies on Ebay these days), try to clean up the desktop, hotsynch the proper software back up into the Palm and then try afresh. But the same thing could happen and I’m running out of time, patience and money (all the bits add up. The whole thing: PDA, keyboard, backup cards, SD cards and Software has come to over £100 by now—and don’t talk to me about laptops!).
I could copy the patches that allow the Palm to read large cards onto the 32MB SD cards, then paste them back into RAM after a hard reset/battery change and then use the Probackup card (I still have it) to restore, although this may cause similar problems because of interfering Palm backup software.
If I could, I would copy Wordsmith and the keyboard drive onto an ordinary SD card, but that doesn’t work due to Wordsmith’s arsinine registration file.
So, I’ll buy another PDA that doesn’t have these problems! I’ve had enough! If anybody has any advise about systems they are using on the road I would be grateful. —Just don’t talk to me about laptops!
Tags: computers and gadgets, Tag Index
Denni