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. 

Things I've done recently that I (and often no one) could not have done 30 years ago. And not just because I was too young at the time....

• Watched the color screen of my TV.  OK, HD TV.
  
• Looked up when color TV came out, without using a book, a library, or a phone...  In the 1950's, if you are curious.  Though it looks like the early ones were pricey. 
• Changed the channel of my TV.  From the couch.   Without a cord connecting my  remote to the TV.
  
• Watched a recorded show... While my SO watched his football game... on the same screen. Yay picture in picture!
• Went shopping for organic specialty cookies... from my computer.
• Ordered books...  also from my computer.  From my hotel room in Australia.  Downloaded them to my PDA and took them with me to read on the plane trip home.  No shipping costs, no extra weight.
  
• Saw a sudoku puzzle in a newspaper that I liked.  Copied it onto my PDA and worked it while leaving the newspaper behind at the car wash.
• Talked to my SO without horrifyingly expensive phone charges.  I was in Australia.  He was in Texas.  The connection was actually pretty clear.
• Got regular news updates from my friends in Mali.  No stamps required.
• Remember the phones from 30 years ago?  Ours was a rotary.  When is the last time you even saw a rotary phone?  Today I called one of my best friends... using a cell phone.   And used a hands-free headset to talk to him when he said that the sound quality was not so great.  Blue tooth was not even a hint back then...
• Wrote notes back and forth with my friend in Scotland.  Real time.  No cost.
• Got a tour from my sister-in-law around her house in Seattle, Washington. I was sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, China at the time.
• Saw the thunderstorm warning on the TV screen and went looking for instant further information of the specifics of the thunderstorm.  Will it hit my house?  Do I need to shut anything down?  Unplug anything?
• Typed this message from my personal small, light computer.  With a color screen.

I love living in this modern age!  I really do not understand people who claim that they do not buy anything online, that they do not even know how.  How do they survive?