Fixing some Palm PDA annoyances, and some other tips

Having used Palm PDAs in the past five or six years, I managed to become very attracted to these gadgets. Throughout the years, I encountered some issues, the solutions of which were not easy to find.

• Power button issue on a Tungsten - my Tungsten T5 stopped reacting to my pressing the on/off switch. At first it worked if I pressed a bit harder, then it only worked if I was turning the PDA off (I turned it on by pressing the Calendar button), and then it stopped working at all. The solution is PowerBtn, this program will re-map the Palm's hardware buttons, allowing my to use another button to turn the PDA on and off.
• The Palm is making a strange noise - I've seen this with my Tungsten T5, a friend's Zire Z22, as well as other PDAs from the Tungsten line. Boy.. was that noise annoying or what?! The problem was further enhanced by the fact that everything was OK at first, but then the PDA would start making this high-pitched sound. Did I drop it? Did I sit on it? Is something wrong with my charger? A bit later it was determined that the source of the noise was the screen, and that this was a common problem. So... if you have such an issue, relax - everyone has it :-)
  Now, the good news is that there is a solution - WhineHack. Apparently, the issue is typical to XScale powered Palm PDAs, but I am not sure this is entirely correct, as I've experienced a similar noise problem with my older Palm m505.
• Too many crashes, you have to reset too often - to solve that, simply stop installing all the crap on your PDA. The best case scenario is to find a set of tools you really use, install them, and then forget about everything else. If you take this conservative approach - you'll definitely see how things improve. If you're that much into experiments, use Palm OS Emulator.
• Sync only the stuff you need - I disabled most of the conduits that are shipped by default, and am only synchronizing the calendar, the memos, the todo items, and the address book. Everything else I transfer to the PDA by writing files directly to the flash memory card (I'm lucky that I have a card reader built into my laptop, but nowadays these are so common that I shouldn't consider myself lucky anymore).

There you go, several years of PDA experience compressed into four bullet points on your screen.

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