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Originally Posted by dreams
Well, considering that it shut itself down, I figure that is the closest I can get to full discharge (without waiting for the week or so for it to delete everything). After a week of no charge, it will "erase" everything I added (it did this the first time I let it sit).
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Yep. On older Palm devices, user data was stored on RAM, and RAM was volatile. It needed a constant trickle of power to preserve data. Let it totally run down, and it you hadn't hotsynced lately you were out of luck.
More recent Palm devices use non-volatile memory to preserve data in case of battery drain, but that has it's own set of issues.
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I looked into upgrading the OS version but saw this.."You can't. While the Palm m130 has flashable ROM, which means a new OS can be written to the ROM (or your own data and programs, with tools such as JackFlash), Palm OS 5.x and later is fundamentally incompatible with the 68K Dragonball CPU used in the m130." Which is what you mentioned below..
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Correct. Palm devices after the 4.X series not only used a new version of the OS, they used a new CPU. They went from the Motorola "Dragonball" chip to one or another ARM based processor, depending on make and model. (The ARM chips are designed by ARM, Ltd. in the UK, who licenses the design to manufacturers, and chips based on the ARM design are made by Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Marvell Semiconductor.)
ARM based PDAs under Palm OS 5.x have a hardware emulation layer that intercepts instructions meant for the Dragonball chip and converts them to ARM instructions that can be run by the real processor. It is also possible to write modules of native ARM code called ARMlets, that can be included in Palm programs to speed up CPU intensive operations.
There used to be an outfit called Brayden Technologies that sold the Jack Flash utility. Jack Flash would let you add and remove programs in ROM on compatible devices. But it wouldn't work on all Palm OS devices (Handspring, for example, used "masked" ROM that could not be modified), and in any case, Brayden is out of business and their programs are no longer available.
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Well, deleting was a nice thought, but I guess I really haven't spent much time investigating this thing yet... I may have to wait until Winter Break to have the time to really learn what I can and can not do...
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It can actually do quite a bit.
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It is fun, and I've found myself pulling it out to read on it in the dark and when I only have a minute or two of time. I thought I wouldn't like reading on a smaller screen, but found it wasn't that bad.
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I got my first PDA courtesy of my then employer, who decided all the IT Staff should have them. What I was supposed to do with mine wasn't clear, so I went looking for things I could run on it that would help me do my job. I soon discovered that I could get a lot of the documentation for systems I dealt with in a form I could convert and put on my PDA, and have a searchable systems library in my pocket. I didn't think I'd appreciate reading fiction on it, but soon discovered I did, and fell headfirst into the deep end of that particular pool...
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Dennis