I’ve been using a PDA for ages.  I started out with YONPY on my beloved old HP48GX (no self-respecting engineering student would dare use anything else). Wasn’t bad (was downright fantastic for cribbing notes, actually), but something a bit more task-suitable was needed, and I wound up getting a PalmPilot Pro. I’ve been on the Palm platform ever since, upgrding the old Pro with a card from a Palm III, moving up to a IIIxe, destroying the IIIxe in a fit of lockup-induced rage, and finally getting a Clie UX-50.

The UX-50 is still a great device, and it just keeps on running (though the battery just doesn’t have the runtime it once did).  Being that it is long out of support (and Sony’s software was never anything to write home about), I always wonder how long I’ll be able to keep it syncing with my laptop.  Fortunately, quite a while it appears.  After doing a fresh install of XP on my laptop (had gone a good 16 months without a reinstall – I think that’s a new record for me), I grabbed Palm Desktop 6.2 (I had been using 4.1.4e, but I’m a sucker for newer versions as much as anyone).  The sync process completed successfully, but when I launched Palm Desktop, I had zilch.  I noticed during the sync that there were actually double entries for Address Book, Memo Pad, etc., so I assumed that it must have been grabbing the data, but Palm Desktop wouldn’t show it to me as it was data from an ‘old’ device and not one that 6.2 expected to communicate with.

All was not lost, and a bit of searching found this very simple fix. I fired up regedit, dug down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PalmSource\Desktop\UiModule[0-3] and modified the file extensions from .mdb to .db for each of the four File0 registry keys.

I synced once more for good measure (not sure if it was needed), fired up Palm Desktop, and sure enough, all my data was there.  I guess the UX-50 will remain a mainstay in my pocket for a good while longer, assuming 6.2 works well under Windows Seven.