Paul Henman at henman.ca

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I think my PDA (a Tungsten E) has died

It started acting funny on Thursday night; I left it charging overnight and kept an eye on it throught Friday and this morning, but it still doesn’t want to respond.

This is the third or fourth time it’s done this recently – just locking up completely, usually with an appoinment alarm shown. Being stuck like this drains the battery, so it gives an error when it’s rebooted saying it needs to be recharged first. I recharge it then reboot again and usually it’s OK, but this time it is taking hours (literally!) to get through the initial setup screens.

I don’t remember the last time I put new software on it, other than the Daylight Saving patch from the Palm website that I installed last week.

The closest thing I can see in the Palm knowledge base is “Solution ID: 28266“, “Fix a handheld that’s extremely slow or temporarily freezing“, but I’ve tried a Hard Reset and it’s struggling through the “digitizer calibration” that’s taking hours and hours!

Given that a Hard Reset puts it back to the “shipped” state (i.e. no data or installed programs, just the basic functions that it had when it was bought), I’m not convinced it’s a software problem; I suspect it could be the battery or (less likely) a hardware problem.

The local PDA store doesn’t list batteries for the Tungsten E or the E2; I wonder if it’s compatible with other models?

Kerri & I went downtown today to find me a new winter coat (we did, at Mark’s Work Wearhouse – almost bought a second when we found it on a rack with $35 coats but it was actually $160) but I also picked up two techie bits, which is my first Top 2 Tuesday post for the new year: my Top 2 techie purchases of 2007 (so far!):

1. miniSync charger/sync combo cable for my PDA, from SoftPocket.ca – excellent PDA specialist store @ Gerrard & Bay
2. Half-Life¹ Anthology (Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Team Fortress Classic) from GameShack in the Atrium [wow, it's even got a Wikipedia entry, even if it is a tiny one]

My PDA is now charged (at long last!) and I’ve been killed many times even on the easy level in Half-Life

In other less-good news, Abby took a chunk out of my hand when I tried to pick her up so that we could trim her claws.

If you liked the Optimus keyboard (which let you program the keycaps to show icons other than simple QWERTY) then you’ll probably like the Mus2 computer mouse – literally point your mouse at what you want to do

1. The good: The ASUS shelf PC looks like a much simpler way to upgrade PCs. I wonder if they really will make it?
   
2. The bad: I phoned BigFootComputers today to see if they had (something like) the coolant that I need to top up the server’s liquid cooling system. The guy was quite brusque and said to look on their website … which I had done and it didn’t answer my question … but nor did he, so I won’t be shopping there. I guess I’ll order it online.
3. The ugly: OnRebate.com – I wonder if they ever pay out? I bought a couple of things from TigerDirect.ca last year and duly sent off the forms/receipts/etc. Many months later I’ve still not received the rebate. It was only $23, but they should still have paid it. When I bought some more RAM for the server recently I bought it from TigerDirect because the rebate made it (just a little) cheaper than elsewhere, but I decided to try to find out what had happened to my previous rebates before I sent this one off. (Again, only $20, but it all adds up.) I sent an email on February 8th and got an auto-reply saying I’d get an answer within 72 hours. I emailed again on Feb 13th and 22nd, and I’ve still not had a reply to any of them. I checked out TigerDirect’s “rebate guarantee” page – they want proof of postage. If I knew OnRebate.com weren’t going to process my legitimate claims then I might have sent it via registered post, but I expected the system would work. I guess that’s the last time I take the “rebated” figure into consideration on TigerDirect’s website.