A Couple of Questions re: Ipaq, Active Synch

[redroader]

I recently picked up an HP Ipaq 4355 that I am quickly falling in love with. I've found a few quirks though, and can't seem to come up with a solution. Soft resets don't seem to help.

Quirk #1: Every so often the unit will pop up with a message that Active Synch "cannot start communications with the desktop computer." This occurs when I'm just working away, i'm not trying to synch or anything. I exit out of A.S., everthing's fine, but sure enough it comes back in a while even though I haven't done a synch in between. ?

Quirk #2: On occasion, when I shut off the unit, the backlight will stay on but the screen itself does go off. This killed the battery once. A soft reset will cure it, but it happens about once or twice a day. ?

Quirk #3: Is it me, or should the programs shut down (vs. just minimizing) when I tap the 'X' at the top right of the screen? What's the workaround for this? Now I go to start/settings/system, hit the 'memory' icon, choose 'running programs' and stop them that way. Jeez, there has to be a better way, right?

Hey, thanks for reading this, and thanks in advance if you have any suggestions! Happy new year, too!

[shawnc]

Quirk #2: On occasion, when I shut off the unit, the backlight will stay on but the screen itself does go off. This killed the battery once. A soft reset will cure it, but it happens about once or twice a day. ?

This sounds like a defective unit to me. I would return it.


Quirk #3: Is it me, or should the programs shut down (vs. just minimizing) when I tap the 'X' at the top right of the screen? What's the workaround for this? Now I go to start/settings/system, hit the 'memory' icon, choose 'running programs' and stop them that way. Jeez, there has to be a better way, right?

Unfortunately this is the way the OS works. However, there are MANY 3rd-party apps that will solve this. My favorite is a freebe from Trancreative called Magic Button. You can get it here:

www.trancreative.com/mb.aspx


Good luck and happy new year.

[Janak Parekh]

Quirk #2: On occasion, when I shut off the unit, the backlight will stay on but the screen itself does go off. This killed the battery once. A soft reset will cure it, but it happens about once or twice a day. ?
This sounds like a defective unit to me. I would return it.
Just before one returns it, though, do a hard reset and get the unit back to a pristine state and try it then. I could imagine a buggy application causing this.

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

Quirk #1: Every so often the unit will pop up with a message that Active Synch "cannot start communications with the desktop computer." This occurs when I'm just working away, i'm not trying to synch or anything. I exit out of A.S., everthing's fine, but sure enough it comes back in a while even though I haven't done a synch in between. ?
Go into ActiveSync on the Pocket PC, and into its options, and make sure it's not to sync on a "schedule".

--janak

[redroader]

Yup, the active synch setting chage did the trick for that. A hard reset didn't solve the backlight problem, however. I did find that by shutting off the unit with the 'Magic Button' taskbar software, the backlight does go out. Go figure, eh? The people at HP said to send it back to them. I probably will, but to those who have sent in stuff for warranty - how long is the turnaround? I've had this thing for a only a couple of weeks!

[Paula]

Yup, the active synch setting chage did the trick for that. A hard reset didn't solve the backlight problem, however. I did find that by shutting off the unit with the 'Magic Button' taskbar software, the backlight does go out. Go figure, eh? The people at HP said to send it back to them. I probably will, but to those who have sent in stuff for warranty - how long is the turnaround? I've had this thing for a only a couple of weeks!

I am thinking about loading this software but with this problem you are having could it be the Magic Button software that is causing it?
Has this just started happening? And if you unload the Magic Button software does it continue to happen?

I was just wondering if the MB software disables the backlight off function of the OS.

Paula

[redroader]

No Paula, the problem started before I installed Magic Button (which by the way seems to be a pretty good program).