I hate my handheld

Actually I don’t, but the damned thing is driving me crazy. You see, I use my Palm Zire 71 for writing when I’m away from home. I’ve had it for… uh, I don’t know, eight months or something, and up until recently it’s worked just fine. But the latest month or so it’s become extremely crash-prone, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

I’ve used Data Viz’s Documents To Go for word processing all along, and as far as I can remember I’ve had no problems with the program. But a while back it started crashing everytime I closed a document. Annoying as this was, it got worse. I reinstalled the handheld apps to no avail. I hard reset my device and reinstalled everything, and at first I thought that had remedied the problem. But no; instead, the app started crashing as soon as I saved, which in turn resulted in the doc being deleted from the SD card when the Zire reset itself (my suspicion is that the crash occurred just after Word To Go deleted the original file, and before it had a chance to replace it with the edited version). As you may have guessed, this is a nightmare scenario if you’re not anywhere near your stationary computer. The document is gone, and there’s no way of getting it back without hot syncing. Not to mention that your fastidious edits are but a memory. In effect my handheld was now unusable as a word processor, but since all other apps worked flawlessly I drew the conclusion that Docs To Go was the felon.

So finally I decided to ditch the DataViz suite and look for an alternative. My choice fell on Wordsmith, which I’ve been trying out for a few days now. Aside from that it can’t sync files on expansion cards like Docs To Go, it’s a superb program. Really much, much better than Word To Go… faster, more options, more intuitive, not to mention more aimed at writers rather than corporate users. But… (maybe you guessed it) Wordsmith crashes on me too! Not as often and not as severely, and the Fatal Alert I receive is not the same one as with Word To Go. But nonetheless, crashes it does. Last night, lying in bed writing the previous post, the program went belly up three times before I managed to finish the piece.

The thing is… I also bought a new SD card (Kingston 256MB) in October. Yes, around the time the Docs To Go problems began. So I’m starting to wonder if the card can be faulty somehow, but that does not explain a) why Wordsmith crashes, since it does not store anything on the card, or b) why the card works in other programs. I play mp3s from it, and I have several games and ebooks stored on it that all work fine. Maybe there’s something wrong with the handheld itself… that’d be just my luck. Since the Zire’s less than a year old it’s probably still under warranty, but who knows how long it would take to get the device repaired or replaced (I don’t even know if Palm Sweden could replace it right away, or if they’d have to ship it back to the US before they can give me a new one).

Damn these technological gadgets you can’t be without once you’ve gotten used to having them around.