Professor Geek

I had a bad experience with an upgrade this week. I decided to upgrade my IPAQ to Windows Mobile 2005 (called WM5 for short). That also required an upgrade of the ActiveSync program from my version 3.8 to version 4.x. I accessed the HP site, paid my $40 for the WM5 upgrade and downloaded the upgrade. First I installed the ActiveSync upgrade and then I upgraded the pda to WM5. All of that worked fine with no error messages or other indications that anything might have gone wrong.

When I reset my pda and replaced it in the cradle, ActiveSync wouldn’t connect with it. Understand that without ActiveSync connecting, you can’t sync anything, load any software, or do anything at all useful. The pda becomes a glorified personal calendar. Try as I may, I could not get it to sync.

When I have trouble like this, I usually turn to the Internet. I did several Google searches for the problem and turned up myriad people with the identical problem as mine. Unfortunately, no solution had ever been found and all of the threads just dried up for lack of an answer. Next, I tried using the online troubleshooter. It just has you do things you have probably already thought of. I didn’t find any new ideas there, but did what it said anyway, in the hopes that I had missed something the first time through. Alas, I had not. After reinstalling ActiveSync twice, rebooting my computer several times (including one time with nothing else running), and even installing ActiveSync on a completely different computer (with the same result), I concluded that it just wasn’t going to work.

I got on HP’s site again and found a button where you can chat with a tech. I did that and spent the next hour and a half chatting with techs who basically told me what I already knew and had me go through the same scripts again. No offense, but they didn’t help at all. Finally it was after midnight, so I asked them to suspend the chat and I went to bed.

The next morning I continued the chat with yet another HP tech. He concluded that I needed to send the unit in for repair. Before doing that, I went to my office and connected the unit to my office computer via Bluetooth. That worked fine and the unit was able to sync with that computer without any problem, from both Bluetooth and USB. Now I was really confused and began to focus on ActiveSync and my configuration on my other two computers, neither one of which could get sync to work. Currently, I am waiting for a Bluetooth adapter, which should come tomorrow. I am going to see if I can at least sync my home computer via Bluetooth. It has been a frustrating 3 days in which I have probably spent at least 10 solid hours working on this. Stay tuned.

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