[Bob Russell]

Kudos to Toshiba customer support so far... I called them first thing yesterday morning and I already have my replacement e405 PDA!! (It was sent next day UPS.)

One slight nuisance is that I had to start from scratch, which means they didn't do the flash ROM update to Win Mobile 2003 SE yet. But I'm not complaining because it gave me a chance to "bond" with my new hardware, and how many PDA makers would provide such great support anyway? I don't know if there's any other PPC that lets the user do an OS upgrade like that. And especially a PDA maker that left the business, like Toshiba. Yet they do stellar support, even so far as to offer than ROM upgrade. Boy could Sony learn a lesson or two from them. Sony left the USA PDA market, and they pretty much slammed the door on it and said "Go away and stay away" to their customer base and even the developers for Clie.

Next I did a restore from my last activesync backup. That was wierd because it didn't find my last backup and used a previous one from a few days before. Boy am I glad I did some backups!!!!! And because it was a bit out-of-date, it had a lot of synchronizing to do. Fortunately, I think everything was still on the desktop and the fresh sync worked well, I hope. I did the internal flash memory refresh manually using Windows file explorer (it's got a neat 32meg flash memory internally for user storage). The SD card I first had problems with was already restored from my previous exercises after the SD failure. Don't know whether the SD card messed up the PPC, or the PPC messed up the SD card, or even if they are independent events. But I hope that I don't have any lingering effects.

One thing I wish I had tried before was a hard reset using the main "secret" on/off switch that is off when a unit ships. You are told to use that to reset the device after the OS ROM update also. I forgot it was even there! The old PDA actually started working last nite. Don't know why, but I didn't do anything different, so I'm pretty sure it's some kind of connection problem or intermittent internal difficulty. In any case, I prefer to take my chances with the new one.

I also put the screen protector on the new one. It transferred pretty nicely, but I didn't try to wash it (lazy and in a hurry) even though it's a Boxwave that's supposed to be washable. Left a little bit of dust, but not enough to really bother me.

I have to say after this experience it only confirmed to me that, right now, I do seem to like PPC better because of the fact that you seem to fit more on a 240x320 PPC screen than a hires screen, even though hires is much crisper. Once you start talking hires+ or vga, everything looks great, but PPC has Pocket Informant, which I think I like slightly better than DateBk5. I'm anxious to see what happens as OS6/Cobalt comes out, and maybe we even see newer versions of the various Palm datebook functions. This Toshiba should be plenty to hold me over till the next generation of PDAs starts to arrive. And's it's also a lot cheaper to keep your current device than to upgrade! But I still consider it temporary to hold me over, so I'm not even going to get a folding keyboard for it.

Just finished one more full backup now that everything looks like it's restored. We'll see if everything works and if I notice anything missing. So far I'm relatively pleased, and my biggest concern is really with the SD card and SD card reader.

One of these days I need to look for "real" 3rd party backup software like the one Alex suggested before. Hope nobody else out there has to face this. And if they do, let's hope other manufacturers handle it as nicely.

What a relief to be back in business!!!!