5500 with PC card/battery sleeve

[disconnected]

I may just not remember this correctly, but I thought that when I had the sleeve on my 3975 that the batteries would wear down at somewhat similar rates, i.e., if I started with both PPC and sleeve batteries at 100 % and used the PPC for a while, both batteries would show less than 100 %. With the 5500, after use, the 5500 is down to 38% and the sleeve battery is still 100%. Does this seem normal?

There is some communication? between the two; I can plug the AC cord into either the sleeve (without adapter) or the iPAQ (with adapter) and either way both charging lights come on.

[Janak Parekh]

You have the 5550? :D What do you think of it?

Sadly, the problem you're reporting has also been mentioned by 5450 users -- it seems that on the 5xxx series the batteries are separate (i.e., the expansion sleeve battery is only used by the expansion card). I hoped they would have fixed this for the new iPAQ, but I guess not. :(

--janak

[disconnected]

What a strange thing! The main thing I use that sleeve for is for the battery power on plane trips. Oh well, at least the battery is replaceable, so I guess I'll get a spare.

I'm not sure what I think of the 5550 yet. Firstly, I'm not sure I'll ever quite forgive it for not having a CF slot, but of course I knew that when I bought it. Other than that --

I haven't installed too much yet (it's taking me a while to locate all my passwords, keys, etc).

I've tried a few games. Beshaped and Diamond Mine are definitely not faster, and I think they're a little slower. Koule is definitely slower. Megalines seems about the same. Cropped Out doesn't work at all, but I'm told they're working on it.

I have a couple of movies encoded with MovieMaker2, and they do seem smoother in Media Player now.

PTVL is a bit flakey; if I leave it on in the background, all the data seems to disappear, but if I actually close it and reopen, the data comes back.

The screen looks about like what I think my 3975 screen looked like before a year of hard use with things like Cropped Out, maybe a little less saturated, but fine. It does seem to have a little more of a black border around the edges than the 3975 did.

It recognized my home network automatically, and I can get to the internet, and to shared files on my PC, but I've not been able to sync wirelessly. I don't remember having to do anything special to accomplish this with the 3975 and linksys card, but I don't keep very good notes. When I turn on wireless, and tell it to sync, it gives me a message that says I need to set up a VPN connection.

Once so far I've had to pull out the battery and put it back before I could get wireless to turn on, but I've read that that's been a common problem with the 5400 series.

Bluetooth manager worked well in recognizing my GPS receiver, but in Mapopolis an extra step seems to be required now each time I turn it on. When I tell it to start GPS, it brings up a screen with all my bluetooth devices (only one), and tells me to choose one. It used to remember the device without asking, but it could be that I've missed a setting somewhere.

Setting up my Sprint connection with a Supplynet cable was painless, but I haven't tried setting up connections for my CF modem; I rarely use it anyway. I also haven't tried a wired ethernet connection yet, or any other wireless network, like Starbuck's.

I installed AOL, and it works ok signing on using TCP/IP connection (wireless), but I haven't tried using it as a dialup ISP yet. (I just bought the 5550 yesterday, and I'm not quite ready for a hard reset yet).

My SD card got corrupted today. It's the first time, and I've had it for about six months. I think it may have happened in my desktop card reader, although the timing's a little suspicious.

On the whole, I think I'll be fairly pleased after I get through the usual connection manager learning curve (my name is disconnected for a reason, after all). I had my 3975 for a year, and with my CompUSA TAP I was able to do an even trade and just pay for a new TAP.

Excuse the long post; that was probably more than you wanted to know.

[Janak Parekh]

What a strange thing! The main thing I use that sleeve for is for the battery power on plane trips. Oh well, at least the battery is replaceable, so I guess I'll get a spare.
One could get the extended battery, if you're not using the PC sleeve for the PC slot.

It recognized my home network automatically, and I can get to the internet, and to shared files on my PC, but I've not been able to sync wirelessly. I don't remember having to do anything special to accomplish this with the 3975 and linksys card, but I don't keep very good notes. When I turn on wireless, and tell it to sync, it gives me a message that says I need to set up a VPN connection.
It might be that you need to put your desktop's IP in the WINS field, or alternatively configure Pocket Hosts.

Once so far I've had to pull out the battery and put it back before I could get wireless to turn on, but I've read that that's been a common problem with the 5400 series.
They didn't fix this? :cry:

My SD card got corrupted today. It's the first time, and I've had it for about six months. I think it may have happened in my desktop card reader, although the timing's a little suspicious.
Sandisk?

Excuse the long post; that was probably more than you wanted to know.
No, I appreciate the long post very much. You're a real power iPAQ user! :D

--janak

[disconnected]

The card is actually a SimpleTech, but the desktop card reader is Sandisk.

In the past, I've noticed some posts about IPs, WINS fields, and Pocket Hosts, and I was relieved that I'd never had to figure all that out. I guess it's time to go back and start reading. :(

[ctmagnus]

It recognized my home network automatically, and I can get to the internet, and to shared files on my PC, but I've not been able to sync wirelessly. I don't remember having to do anything special to accomplish this with the 3975 and linksys card, but I don't keep very good notes. When I turn on wireless, and tell it to sync, it gives me a message that says I need to set up a VPN connection.
It might be that you need to put your desktop's IP in the WINS field, or alternatively configure Pocket Hosts.

I've got my desktop's IP in the WINS field and I use Pocket Hosts but I still can't sync. It worked once, but that's it. Knocked my socks off when it finally synced after not doing so for so long!

One thing I just noticed is, even though I have the WINS field set in the nic properties, PocketDHCP reports a blank WINS Server entry. And PocketDHCP doesn't report the WINS settings on my 3670 so I can't cross-check with PocketDHCP exclusively.

Edit: Pocket Hosts was the culprit. I removed my PC's IP from there and now it syncs. :confused totally:

[iant54]

Having bought a couple of the 1800 mAh batteries for my CF Card Plus expansion jacket at the same time as the 5550, the fact that the unit doesn't draw top-ups from the jacket is bad news.

It's meant that I've had to revise my strategy, such that I shall keep my 3970 for use as an extended trip PPC (reading, reference, music, game-playing), and use the 5550 as my organiser.

[that_kid]

The pocketpc considers activesync to be a "work" connection so make sure that you have your work settings the same as your internet setting.
I also have a pcmcia plus pack and it doesn't charge my internal battery either. I do notice that my 5555 uses the plus pack battery first then moves over to the internal one. This only works when I don't have a card in the plus pack. The only thing I use my plus pack for is so I can power my sprintcf card without using battery that connects to the card. Other than that I LOVE my 5555, the new os is great and they finally did something good with windows media player cause with version 8.5 I was lucky to stream a good video file at 200K, now I can stream a 700K file with no problems and I also streamed a 1.2Mb stream without any problems.