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Thought I scored a deal on a Palm Pilot, now I just have a paperweight
Bought a Palm Pilot Vx at a garage sale for $15 last weekend. Found out the hard way you can't sync it with anything modern without a serial port and ancient software. Anyone actually found a use for these things that doesn't involve hunting down a Windows 98 machine?
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jasonf3511d ago
Man that's rough, I feel for you... got a similar brick sitting in my drawer right now. Those old serial sync cables were a nightmare even back in the day, never mind now. Maybe you can hack together a power source and use it as a fancy alarm clock or something.
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gavin36511d ago
Joke is on me, I actually tried that once with an old Palm Pilot. Spent a whole weekend rigging up a power supply from an old phone charger and some wire I found in the garage. Thing lit up for about 30 seconds, then the screen just went dark and started smelling like burnt toast. Now I've got a fancy paperweight that looks like it belongs in a museum of failed DIY projects. Honestly, I think those old devices were designed to make you feel like a genius when they actually worked for five minutes straight.
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pat78111d ago
Oh man @gavin365 I feel your pain on that burnt toast smell, been there done that with an old Handspring Visor I tried to resurrect. Here's what I learned the hard way, those old serial docks are actually easier to fix than you'd think if you can find a proper replacement battery online, not just rigging up some random power source. I actually got one working again after buying a cheap lithium cell from an electronics surplus site and soldering it in, took me maybe an hour tops. Just make sure you match the polarity right or yeah you'll get that same smoky smell, ask me how I know. The other trick is checking capacitor health before you even plug it in, those things dry out after twenty years and they'll short out your whole project if you skip that step.
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