As my readers know, I was a big PDA user. Mostly Palm devices, several of which I still have in good working order, including a Palm i705 and a Palm LifeDrive. The LifeDrive was a really slick bit of technology with a three Gig hard drive, a SD slot, and both WiFi and Bluetooth support. I still use it now and then and have a lot of legacy data still stored on it. All that data is synced to my desktop running XP, and I have some desktop apps to get at the data stored in third party software. BrainForest for example, a good data organizational tool that was developed for the Palm platform.
Recently I upgraded my laptop to Window 7 (32bit). This was full, format the drive install. So I started the process of installing the applications on the freshly wiped and loaded system. Everything went fine until I loaded the Palm Desktop software and tried to synch the LifeDrive.
Windows 7, has been really good at recognizing stuff that gets plugged into it, turned up its nose at my LifeDrive. I visited the Palm site and it’s seems that they have written off their PDA line. Not a bad business decision, since the future is in Smart Phones, but I need to get that data exported and accessible before I upgrade my desktop to Windows 7.
Palm’s story is that the software for the desktop and the PDA drivers are now owned by a separate company and it up to them to provide support for Windows 7. Next step would be to try synching with my LINUX system. I know there is Palm PDA support in multiple LINUX apps.
Filed under: Gadget, Palm, PDA, Windows7 | Tagged: LifeDrive, Operating System, Palm, PDA, Windows7 | 5 Comments »
Urbin Technology 