A few years ago our office bought 10 Palm V’s. Over the years any number of horrible things have happened to them. Recently one was sat on breaking the screen. Another, I just found out, hasn’t been used in many months because “it doesn’t work right”. I asked to take a look at it. One problem I noticed pretty quickly was that if you do a soft reset the digitizer loses its calibration and you’ll never be able to recover without a hard reset which will open with the digitizer calibration (and wipe out everything).
So I searched on the internet and found a neat piece of (free!) software called DigiFix from www.copera.com that will reset your digitizer to your settings on a soft reset and can also be assigned to a hard key so that it is always available if something else goes wrong (similar thing could be done by assigning Welcome to a hard button, but this recovers settings automatically).
Another problem seems to be the battery won’t hold a charge. So I need a new battery but it is sealed inside the case. I don’t want to pay to do this, but if I could transfer the good battery in the Palm with the broken screen to the one with the bad battery so I go looking for that and find detailed instructions and pictures!
And just as a bonus, I find a place that will sell an original hard case for a Palm V/Vx for only $5 and a stylus that converts to a pen for $5 (plus $4 shipping.)
I tried the battery transfer. You can open a Palm V by heating the sides with a heat gun. But if you aren’t careful you can melt the screen and/or the buttons. It wasn’t easy but I did it. Then you have to unglue the battery from the back of the screen. Can’t use a heat gun because that would defnitely melt the screen. In the meantime I did melt the buttons on the one with the broken screen. Then I opened the one with the bad battery and and managed to break the screen while I was trying to peel the battery off. I hate doing things that take skill. Anytime I hear about being able to solder something or carefully open a case I just need to forget it. You can open the iPod apparently and replace the battery but I’m thinking that for me that would be a really bad idea (and I don’t need to do it yet anyway).