m505 not working suddeny

[sunshine]

On Sunday morning, I was using my palm with no problems. I currently have Silverscreen on my m505 and I had downloaded one of their 'themes' into my palm with no problems. That was 9am

I came home that evening at 10pm and my unit would not turn on. I had left my palm in my case sitting on my desk. I thought may be the battery had died, but I could have sworn there was enough juice in my palm. I leave it in my cradle every night. Needless to say, I had a minor panic attack. I pressed some random buttons and tried a soft reset. The only response I got was the Palm Power icon flashing continuously.

I left the unit on my charger for 2 hours before I came back and tried a hard reset. Fortunately, the unit turned back on and when I performed a hotsynch, the data from my computer was transferred to my palm. Since then I haven't had any problems, and I believe I have everything back on my palm that I had before.

I've been trying to stay positive and that it was a fluke accident, but with all the reports of m505 problems on the internet, it has made me nervous about my PDA. I would hate to think that I made the wrong purchasing decision. I have only had my palm (my first one!) since August 2002 and so far I love it.

When it failed to work Sunday night, i realied how much I rely on my 505. I have heard that the information on my plam can be backed up onto the memory card periodically? Is this true? Can I do it daily? I figure if this happens again AND I would need to hard reset, AND I'm nowhere near my computer, I can still function by uploading info from my memory card.

I currently have a 64MB sandisk memory card that i use to store games, and some data files. Can I back up information onto this same card, or do I need to buy a completely separate card for this purpose?

[OldBlue]

It sounds like your battery drained completely, considering that everything was OK before and everything has been OK since then, after fully charging your m505. Since you left your m505 in your case overnight, I would suspect that something was pressed against one of the buttons, causing your Palm to remain "on." I used to have my m505 in a Palm Slim Leather Case and would carry it in my front pants pocket. I often pulled it out and found it on! Closer examination showed that the case pressed on the buttons and turned on my Palm. I switched to a metal case because its rigid form held the case away from the buttons and did not flex like my leather case.

You can download Blue Nomad's BackupBuddyVFS:Free and use it to back up your RAM contents to your memory card. This is the freeware version and works just as well as the shareware version, but lacks a few of its features. Here's the link:

http://www.bluenomad.com/bbvfs/prod_bbvfs_download.html

OldBlue

[sunshine]

I always forget the difference between RAM and ROM. If I save all the things I have on RAM, do I have to worry about anything on ROM? Or is there nothing saved on ROM?

Can I save all my data on the MEmory card I have now or do I need to use a separate card?

Thanks for your help!

[DrMud]

Sunshine,
1) Random Access Memory..RAM... read an write.
2). Read Only Memory..ROM...just read.
YOu have nothing to worry about with the Palm apps that are in ROM.
3) BBVFS will back up the files in Palm RAM (8Mg) to the card you have assuming you have space. I'm betting you have plenty.

Now to the fearful event. I think the chance that your "event" was battery failure is good. Equally possible is a conflict in the OS over handling too many events at the same time. Lock ups with the flashing Palm Logo are not too uncommon. The HardReset is the usual manner of breaking the lope by clearing the decks of all 3rd party software. Where your story diverts is that when you restored all of the software your Palm did not lock up again. From your narration of the events it seems the "skin" was downloaded to the palm and that was the last HotSync before the crash. It is possible the skin found other software attached to the location in the OS that it wanted to use and locked the Palm. But on the reinstall, the sequence of installed software was different and so the skin could function without conflict.
Breathe deep and smile it could be minutes or months but it does not matter because you're going to back up to the card.
Doc