NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/sys/handheld/1869

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-13 | 3.1 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!hwcs!adrian
From: [e-mail] (Adrian Hurt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: P(sigh)on has made me cry again...
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 14 Aug 92 11:34:10 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News Administrator)
Organization: Dept of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland
Lines: 56

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>
>Pete Goodeve writes:
>>are making me feel a lot better:  1) The new one *is* version 1.80F,
>>(my previous was 1.77F) so *presumably* the cable problem is fixed(!);
>Are you saying it's a cable problem that took out the buttons?

I'm saying it's a cable problem that took out the buttons, and I got that
from Psion.  (Mind you, they also said they had fixed the problem. :-)
The fact that the problem starts out intermittent and then becomes
permanent is consistent with it being to do with the ribbon cable.

>Pete Goodeve also writes:
>>     in about a quarter hour all told, I was able to read the
>>necessary pages in the manual, fire up the link, and copy all my precious
>>data onto hard disk and back to the new machine!
>Buy a Flash RAM card and make it your default disk.  Swapping to the new
>machines are they arrive each month/week/day is much easier then (I've found).

One minor point here.  The card is either Flash or it is RAM.  Flash cards
are cheaper and more efficient with their use of space, and they are more
permanent.  Data in a Flash card will stay there, whether the card is in
the Series 3 or not.  You can't delete or alter data on a Flash card,
though.  (Well, you can, but deleting it just scrubs the data, it doesn't
get the space back; altering is basically the same as making a modified
copy and deleting the old copy, see above about deleting.)  RAM cards
have their own lithium batteries to retain data when they are outside
the Series 3, but when the lithium battery is gone, so is the data.
They are less efficient at their use of space, because creating a
directory - even an empty one - uses some space.  But you can write,
alter or delete data at leisure.

>Pete Goodeve writes again:
>>Tell me.  Is there *anyone* out there who has had a Psion 3 for, say,
>>more than three months that *is* still working?

Mine must be about three months old, and is still working.  (Now that I've
written that, it'll probably stop. :-)

>Bernd Meyer writes:
>>I simply can not dial with it (only suceeded once or twice), despite of
>>being able to dial with my Macintosh and its speaker at the same phone.

I found that how you hold the Series 3 relative to the phone can have an
effect.  Holding the phone right up to the speaker did not work.  Holding
the phone up to the Series 3's case near the end, right up to one of the
SSD's but still on the underside, did work.

Repeated use of the buzzer for such things as dialling and alarms will,
of course, eat your batteries up. :-)

--
 "Keyboard?  How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt                 |    JANET:  [e-mail]
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