Palm… issues.
My Palm Tungsten T3 is pretty much my gateway to the world when I'm at work, and my backup brain when I'm not at work, remembering birthdays and addresses for me. Lately, I've been feeling cut off from the world and suffering from mild amnesia. My T3 has been very… stupid.
About a week ago this started. it would crash, I'd reset it by hand (which is odd, because I have a program called "crash" that's supposed to automatically restart it in the event of a crash…) all would be happy. This about 2 days ago it got remarkably worse. A reset wouldn't fix anything. I got frustrated and put the thing down on my desk. A few minutes later, I notice a white screen. I try and reset, and it went back to the "Palm Powered" boot up screen, and hung. And then the image starts to fade back to white. I try the dreaded hard reset, and it takes me back to the "Palm Powered" screen, and hangs again. I did some googling and found nothing that seemed to fit. (Part of the reason I'm writing this is to help some other poor sap who runs into this same problem) About when I'm ready to give up, it resets. All my memory is lost, but it starts working again. I restore from a recent backup (woohoo, SD cards!) and carried on with my life.
The Next Day… (Dun DUN dun!) The palm was at it again, and I couldn't even get it to reset. Now when I would press reset, the screen would flash white and immediately turn off again. I was sure there was a hardware problem. Then it somehow went back to the "Palm Powered" screen, and I decided to try a hard reset. Sure It would wipe my memory, but it would get my palm back, and I could restore from the same backup I did yesterday. I do the hard reset, and nothing. Still doing that fading-away-to-nothing-Palm-Powered-thingie screen. I try and do a hard reset 2 more times. Still nothing. This was happening over lunch, so I decided to give palm tech support a call. The nice indian lady I talked to really wanted me to do a hard reset again. I explained I've already tried this 3 times and it did nothing, but I decided to humor her. HOLY. CRAP. IT. WORKED. Now I know how all those people I talk to every day who say they already rebooted feel when I tell them to reboot. I restored from my backup and continued on my merry way.
This worked for about 5 hours. Next Time I pulled the T3 outta my pocket, blamo, it wouldn't power on. back to flash of white when rebooting. This of course occurred while I was at the airport to pick up my dad and had the flight numbers stored in my palm. I got the numbers again after a quick phone call, but it was still irritating. This pattern of flipping out and me restoring from backup continued until yesterday, where when I managed to reset it, I decided not to restore from my backup. And as of 6:30 this morning, it was still working. I guess I'll slowly start to put software back on, seeing when it will break.
Quirks in Palms work alot like food poisoning.
Your problem is most likely a 3rd party application or a combination of applications interacting. One day, out of nowhere, the applications start tormenting you even though you have always been able to “eat seafood and drink beer” together.
My experience with quirky Palm and Pocket PC devices is that restoring backups usually puts the problem right back in the device. I had this problem across both platforms, with both an iPAQ PPC and a Palm Tungsten W.
Just as you are suggesting, I would recommend putting applications back — one every few days. You’ll eventually find out what is causing your Palm indigestion.
Comment by John Swords — 1/27/2005 @ 2:33 pm