In less than 24hrs, I’ve gone from the depths of despair to the wondrous heights of joy. 🙂 What about you ask? I’ve upgraded my Palm Treo 750 to Windows Mobile 6.0 without any major mishap. I did this despite Microsoft’s ActiveSync program refusing to connect with my device no matter what I did. I did this despite my investment in a bluetooth usb adapter that refused to sync via bluetooth with ActiveSync. I knew that I couldn’t dare upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 knowing that I couldn’t connect to ActiveSync. Why? Because all my freaking contacts, calendar appointments, tasks etc were being held hostage! So, I ponied up $9.95 for a tool (Sprite Migrator tool) which was whipped out on the eve of Microsoft announcing the release of WM 6.0 for Palm Treo 750. I backed up the items that I could and prayed to heavens that the backup was good. Then, I started on the task of reformatting my phone before even upgrading to WM 6.0. I didn’t want to take any chances of some 3rd party application mucking up this critical point in my phone’s life. After all was done, WM 6.0 popped up nice and pretty. Right away, I noticed several pretty points about it. There are still some features I would like such as being able to do a true ‘soft’ reset that’s more akin to a non-destructive recovery of a wayward computer. Currently, a soft reset of your Treo 750 means it just reboots. Right now, the best feature of WM 6.0 is the ability to turn off ATT’s proxy!!! This means no crossing my fingers and hoping that a .CAB file I pulled off the intarweb ((That’s not to say that 3rd party apps rock at times like said .CAB file. It worked wonders when my Treo was running WM 5.0)) won’t mess with the phone’s innards. It comes already packaged by Microsoft!! This ability to turn off ATT’s proxy means (for me) that I can simply install my Spectec miniSD wifi card‘s driver and pop the little thing in & I’m good to surf the internet. That was however easier said than done. Spectec’s website is not the easiest to understand, but I decided to email the contact person who led me to the files to download. I was able to get online without a problem. Without further ado, I started downloading and installing my favorite mobile phone applications like Windows Live Search, Google Maps, Yahoo to Go, Spybot for Mobile Phones, etc. As I got more confident that I hadn’t irreversibly messed with anything, I decided to tackle my bête noire: ActiveSyncing again. This time, I tried to find some free tool to replace ActiveSync on a Mac, but to no avail. Then, I stumbled upon this gem: there’s a service (Mail2Web) that allows you to create an email account that’s managed by a Microsoft Exchange Server. Well, it just so happens that there’s a feature in ActiveSync on the phone that allows you to sync your contacts/tasks/appointments/calendar to your email as long as it’s on an Exchange server. Without even thinking twice, I signed up and as I speak, I’ve got my contacts safely synced with my Mail2Web free account. Now, for something theoretically this easy, you’d expect me to breeze through it. Not so. Being worried about somehow accidently getting through on ATT’s internet network, I’d click “cancel” whenever a window popped up on the phone about connecting to the “ATT GPRS or 3G network”. And everytime I did this, my contacts et al would sync, but after awhile, I’d get a temporary network error code (0x8502000F). I was stumped and worried that I’d have to do another reformat of the phone to clear the cobwebs in my phone’s brain. I initially though that I didn’t set up the server source right so I deleted the Microsoft exchange connection toMail2Web. I didn’t read the fine print and found out that deleting that server source took my contacts/tasks/calendar/appointments with it!!! Now, I was madder than a hornet. To make matters worse, I’d installed and uninstalled the Spectec driver enough times to addle the phone’s brain such that it would show me as being connected or start randomly connecting even when the darn wifi card wasn’t in the phone!! No number of soft resets could get the phone to stop acting up. I decided to install a WM 6 compatible driver for my phone although it’s really for the Motorola Q device. This was recommended by a Henry who responded to my email for help on the right/updated drivers for Treo 750. After popping the wifi card in and then out, the phone miraculously didn’t still keep searching for a wifi signal. I did a soft reset without the card in to confirm that I wasn’t seeing things and voila! all was right with my world again. So, I decided go ahead and test my internet connection. I got right on. First order of business was to square out the Mail2Web server thingamahoochie and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get my contacts/tasks/calendar back!! 😀 Then, I was able to configure Outlook on the phone to send emails! That’s another sweet thing about WM 6 which has more options for tinkering with important settings. So right now, all is right with my world/phone.
In other news, I still haven’t done my Christmas shopping. I’m thoroughly confuddled as to what to get people, but we shall see. Take care y’all and Thank God It’s Friday!!!!!!! lol. Can you tell I’m really excited!!! I got M to take me to work today and he graciously yielded to my request even though he’s been recovering marvellously from an attack of the evil flu. Wednesday night saw M sicker than I’ve ever seen him i.e. with a 100+ fever. I like cuddling to a warm M, but he was burning up!! I eventually had to wipe him down with a wet towel which he didn’t like too much. 🙂 Still, he’s got some congestion going on and I hope it clears up soon. I also hope my immune system doesn’t succumb to any germs because I had had my bout with some sort of weird illness that lasted one night (Tuesday night). I swear I never fall ill and I think my body’s waiting for me to go home to Nigeria and have the mother of illnesses befall me. lol. It’s the strangest thing to not have been sick at all here in USA and have had lots of bouts with malaria etc at home. Oh well….
Today’s the department christmas party which I didn’t not “dress up” for. In fact, I didn’t take a shower this morning (I intend to later on in the day) and have a scarf on my head which a department worker thinks is a hat?! It’s at 6pm and I’m not so sure if I’ll be going. There’s also another department’s christmas party at 6.30pm which I’m not so sure I’ll be going for either. Then, tomorrow is the lab’s get together at the bosses’ place at 1pm. I’m starting to have second thoughts about that too because of how long it’s potentially going to last. Depending on my mood, I can be a lingerer or an in-and-out girl. We shall see says cryptic Jane.
Here’s the gnarly part of my suggestion. After I had a second Adobe PDF printer showing up in my “Printers” list, I tried to print out a page to the “working” PDF printer. Well, it printed, but somehow it kept printing to the faulty Adobe PDF printer also!! I got my PDF file alright, but the other PDF printer was going nuts. I finally went into the printer properties by right-clicking the troublesome printer and then, selected “properties”. I went to the “Ports” tab and clicked the 2 Adobe PDF printers listed then. Then, I hit “enable printer pooling.” I have no idea what that did at the time, but I was just frustrated. To my uneducated mind, I understood the solution to my problem at the time (having 2 printers that did the same thing except one worked and the other didn’t) as being: I needed to merge the 2 printers. “Pooling” meant something close to “merging” so I pooled the 2 printers ports which were: (i) LPT1 (the bad Adobe PDF printer) and (ii) Documents\*.pdf which was the working Adobe PDF printer. Immediately after pooling the printers, the bad Adobe PDF printer disappeared from the Printers” list. Continue reading Problems with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional and more
