indigo_rose99

I went to the eye doctor a week and a half ago. He admired my aging Palm Treo680. He is a former Palm III and V user who went to Blackberry. He said that he spent six months in the transition. He says that even now there are things he could do on the Palm that he cannot do on the Blackberry. He begged me, for his sake, to stall changing for as long as possible.

I used Palm Desktop of my XP. When I went to Vista, I explored Palm Desktop 6.2, and discovered I hated it. It lost functionality (colors, almost every sync user choice option, and the ability to delete duplicates), so I tried to install Palm Desktop 4.1.4 on Vista. Which worked, despite Palm's official NoGuarantee. I even got the bluetooth sync working with Vista.

So then I went from Vista to Windows 7 on the same laptop. Windows 7 would install Palm Desktop 4.1.4... but nothing I could do would make it sync. And I was pretty creative. I installed saved Calendar files on the Desktop, but no connection. So I wiped it and went to Palm Desktop 6.2. With a cable and some begging, that synced. Two hours later I discovered that my Treo had two copies of every single entry. For ten years of calendar entries. Remember what I said about Desktop 6.2 taking away the syncing options? Telling it to have the Treo override the Desktop was one of those options that went away.

So then I alternated wiping and installing Desktop 4.1.4 and 6.2 and crying and cursing and reading other people's suggestions online and having the biggest headache....

In the end, with considerable tech support help from T, I installed virtual XP on Windows 7, and started running Palm Desktop 4.1.4 inside it. The sync requires a cable and is a bit fussy about working. Virtual XP is slow to load. Despite their promises about applications on virtual XP having an icon on my Windows 7 Start Menu, that is a flat lie. No icon. But I can still copy/paste text to and from the Palm Desktop.

So while I am not happy, it is functional.