Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Durham, NC
Posts: 78

So, I've got a new Visor. Was hotsynching fine now I can't. Here's my setup:

Home PC. Installed Palm Desktop. USB Cradle. Synch works great.

Office PC. Installed Palm Desktop. Synch works great. Then, installed PocketMirror. Synch works great. MS Outlook in my pocket. You gotta like that.

Go home. Drop Visor into cradle. Hotsync? Nada. Eventually times-out with Can't find your computer.

Steps:

Checked USB cable connection.
Rebooted PC.
Checked settings: Local USB is selected on the HotSync System Tray applet. In Setup, on the Local tab it's got Com1 selected. No option for USB. Something either got blown here or that's just how it's supposed to be. Not sure.
None of this has helped so...
Installed PocketMirror on home PC. No help.
Reinstalled Palm Desktop. No help.

I'm now at a loss. Any ideas? You can have this on two separate PCs right? Hot synching to each? I read somewhere here that folks have gotten that to work.

I won't know til tommorow if I can still HotSynch at the office. I'm assuming I can. We'll see.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Durham, NC
Posts: 78

Jeez. Solved my problem. Read some more posts here and after reading every solution down to including pulling out Regedit someone suggested to someone else doing a pin-reset. Duh... I reboot my PC, but not the handheld. I reboot and life is good. Go figger.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Antigo, WI
Posts: 37

had the same problem yesterday and after checking out everything else, did a soft (pin in back of visor) reset and it worked. Don't know why. Those kind of resets always scare me, afraid of loosing all the info i have stored on the visor, so i am reluctant to do them. But this time it work.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 6

happened to me also. Stopped hotsyncing yesterday for no apparent reason, but after checking everything I could think of, I did a soft reset and all was well...

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Chelmsford, MA USA
Posts: 62

I had a similar problem, but believe it or not it was all due to the Visor not seated properly in the cradle. It was ever so slightly tilted.

I removed the Visor from the cradle and put it back and worked fine.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Topeka, KS, USA
Posts: 26

I've got a pair of Visors and one of them seems to go stupid at sync time. About every three days I seem to have to do a pin reset, and then it is happy. I have been using USB W98. Is this hotsync / pin reset situation a hardware or software problem? Is anyone using a serial connection having the same problem?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Durham, NC
Posts: 78

My Visor went stupid again and wouldn't HotSync. Had to pin-reset. Is this just going to happen every-other day? What's up with that?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 7

I have had the same problem except mine still doesn't work after I do the pin reset. Any suggestions?

------------------
The capacity for self-reformation and change lies within.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 19

Last syched on New Year's Eve. Now my Visor *refuses* to sync for the last two days. Have tried soft reset, IR beaming, using serial cradle. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Was thinking Y2K bug? But then read here that some of you were experiencing problems *before* the turn of the century so...

ANy other suggestions out there?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 19

Ok, did some reading and figured out why IR hot sync wasn't working (IrLink beta version has expired). But still can't figure out why serial cradle can't synch... Even if I got the live version of IrLink, can't get it to my Visor. Tried to soft reset again, no luck.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posts: 109

Well, I had been experiecing the exact same problem. I had rebooted my machine, switched USB ports, etc. to no avail.

Then, after reading this thread, I pin-reseted my Visor and it synced the first time!

is this a common problem? Should we notify Handspring?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Durham, NC
Posts: 78

<sigh> After successfully hotsyncing with my serial cradle all day at work, I come home to my USB cradle and no synch. Pin reset is not fixing problem this time. I've restarted Hotsync. No joy.

I did just run the BackupBuddy install. Maybe I need to reboot my system.

It's incredibly frustrating this whole I'll-hot-sync-for-you-maybe-sometimes-when-I-feel-like-it thing. Grrr.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 2

Whenever my OVD stops Hotsyncing, I turn it off and let the cradle Hotsync button turn it on for the Hotsync. So far, it's worked every time. No pin reset necessary.

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Stony Brook, NY, USA
Posts: 35

Turn off any Hackmaster utilities running in the background.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 14

I have to agree with Belthasar. I found this out the hard way. I had to delete all dowloaded programs, before I found that Hackmaster was the problem. I haven't loaded it since. Also, I have found that if you are using a program that uses the IR port (i.e. OmniRemote or PalmRemote) this will also affect Hotsync...once again, go figure. One last comment, USB is not all it is cracked up to be.

[This message has been edited by marvlboy (edited 01-06-2000).]

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 6

Got my Visor Deluxe and connected serial cradle to my PC at work. Hotsynched 8 or 9 times over the next few days with no problems. Then I started getting message that it couldn't connect. Tried everything in troubleshooting guide and suggested here. Even called HS customer support. Tried a few more things that didn't work. They finally determined that the Serial Cradle must have been defective and are sending me a new one. Anyone else have a similar experience?

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Durham, NC
Posts: 78

Disable HackMaster? But.. but... then my TrekSounds hack won't work... What's the point of having a palm device that doesn't make cool noises? <sigh>

Maybe I'll give that a try. Frankly, I'd rather keep pin-resetting than lose my cool sounds.

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 434

On my Visor:

HackMaster is fine (but SOME OF THE HACKS ARE NOT).

OmniRemote is fine (unless I start the HotSync when the program is active).

My colleague has a IIIe with NO extra software installed. (She couldn't have since she hadn't installed her Palm Desktop anywhere yet.) After 1 week of use she got a looping crash requiring a hard reset. Go figure.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Philadelphia
Posts: 242

<B>Here's how to fix Hot Sync problems</b>

Do you get an error message saying "can't connect to desktop?" This is a known problem--although most Handspring techs don't seem familiar with it. In some instances it is a hardware defect with the Visor, but in most cases here's how to fix it:

(a) Simplest. Just do a soft reset on your Visor. It may work next time. Worked for me.

(b) Worse comes to worst, you may have to edit the registry. If you're not comfortable doing this, don't, call Handspring, have someone walk you through it, but what you'd want to do is find the section dealing with the Visor USB drivers, click on it, select all the items listed in the right-hand pane, and delete them.

Then uninstall the Palm Software and reinstall it.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 3

For me this problem is isolated to the USB cradle on my Win98 machine. I sync more frequently at work on a WinNT 4.0 machine with a serial cradle and I've never seen the "Can't connect to desktop" error.

Has anyone had this problem on a serial cradle on a Win98 machine? I've been assuming its a USB problem, but maybe its related to Win98.

Soft reset always gets me out of the problem.

I've also never installed Hackmaster on my Visor.


[This message has been edited by sad (edited 01-12-2000).]