Hints & Tips

PC Pro has been running hints and tips from readers in this column for three months now, so I'd like to remind you to send any suggested tips (or requests for tips) to the email address at the end of this column. This month's crop are the best yet, including one that I don't have an answer for.

If you are having problems persuading Windows CE to connect to your NT desktop machine, then the commonest reason by far is that your user account doesn't have dial-up permission under NT. This problem manages to catch out most CE users.

Robin Penny asks: Could you perhaps mention something about compatibility between old Palm Pilot apps and the new Palm III in your column. Nobody seems to say whether their apps can be used in both environments or not.

Certainly. All of the applications that I use work on both the older PalmPilot models and the new Palm III. I believe that a few applications have had minor changes to make them work with the Palm III, so I would always advise downloading the latest version. Where problems have occured, it seems that the new fonts (and missing older fonts) in the PalmOS are most often to blame, although hacks (installed through HackMaster) are also suspect. Compatibility has always been excellent between Pilot releases, and the developers should be congratulated at treating us users so well.

Ken Hughes has a question that I don't have an answer to: A possible one to include in the PDA tips & tricks would be how to register file types in CE. I dont know how to do this and its a real pain not being able to just double tap a file and have it open in Word etc.

If anyone knows how to update file associations for CE, please send me an email, as I'd love to know the answer to this. I would imagine that file associations are handled in the registry, but I don't have any details to go on. There is a similar problem with imported files on the Psion Series 5, but as that has the file association stored in each file, this is only really a problem with files used with the Web Browser. Can anyone help?

David Brookes (davidb@tinet.ie) has put together his own collection of hints and tips for the PalmPilot as an AportisDoc file, which you can find at: http://homepage.tinet.ie/~seadancer/dbnet/palmpilot/index.html

Thanks to David, here are a few samples from his collection:

If you need to do a reset because of a badly behaved application, sometimes a soft reset isn't enough to free up your Pilot. In that case, try holding down the up button while performing the soft reset. This will apparently bypass the start up code of your applications, and may be enough to allow you to kill the ofending app.

In ToDo or Memopad, there is no need to use the New button to start a new entry - just start writing!

If you use a stylus stroke from the bottom to the top of the display to enter Grafitti help, you may find it more convenient to first tap the entry area (which starts punctuation mode), then use the up stroke. This will take you to the punctuation help page.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: November 3, 1998