Fun with the new T|X

Recently my son stepped on my Palm E2. He is only about five so the blame is mostly mine. Fortunately, it was not all bad. Ever since I bought the E2 for ~ 190 a couple of years ago I had wished I had something with a little more capabilites. Since the E2 met its demise with a broken screen the next order of business was a hard case from Proporta to protect the new device. I considered the aluminum cases, but they seemed somewhat less useful and awkward. I settled on a clear case which has been stepped on and is still ok. I like Proporta because they seem to charge very fair prices for products and shipping (despite being across the pond) the lifetime guarantee is nice as well.

Compared to the Palm E2 the extra processing power in the TX is really nice when running Mapopolis (too bad Mapopolis is no more and nobody else is making new GPS programs for the Palm). Fortunately, I live in the North East and there is not a lot of new construction so I don't need any updates yet. Strangely, Mapopolis only runs well (voice command work, does not crash) when run from a SD card.

The next step was to try and get the Palm TX to dial my brand new W385. The steps that worked for me are:

Easy Part

1. Update the phone link application (I don't think this is necessary)
2. Establish a bluetooth connection between the phone and TX

Hard Part (I found these on a couple of boards)

1. Go to Prefs->Connection- select my phone connection and Edit-
2. change the "Model:" to "Standard GSM" from the drop-down list-
3. click on "Details..." button that appears-
4. replace the Init String with "+MODE=2" (do not include the quotes)- click OK- click OK- click Done (sorry I have no idea why or how this works, any comments welcome)
5. pull the battery
6. reboot the palm
7. use the dialer and presto!
8. NOTE steps 6 and 7 ARE required and are often left out.

Now my Palm dials my phone.

Internet Security 2008 (A necessary file could not be loaded (1002,1) after installing a Norton 2008 program) (download symfix)

Since this is a fix/workaround I will cut right to the chase. I had the following symptoms:

• I have multiple accounts on my computer (mine, wife, kids)
• I installed NIS from my account and it worked fine
• NIS did not work in the other accounts (Virus protection was off)
• I recieved "A necessary file could not be loaded (1002,1) after installing a Norton 2008 program" when running in the other accounts
• I am running XP, but I suspect the same problem would happen in 2K and Vista (since it si a directory rights issue).
• Norton's automatic help unhelpfully suggested either
• Download symfix (did not help)
• Unintalling and reinstall (which did work for my wife's account but it was too time consuming)
  

My problem was an Norton Internet Security 2008 feature to "protect the files from hackers", it also seems to "protect" them from multiple accounts. You can find this feature under Norton Internet Security Tab, Internet Security Options, How to protect your product from hackers. If you turn this off you should be able to use NIS on all your accounts (it worked for me). This is a lot nicer than uninstalling and reinstalling NIS in each account.

If you want to root cause this yourself use windows explorer from one of the accounts NIS is not working in. See if you can see the C:\Program Files\Norton Internet Security directory. If Norton is installed somewhere else you can look at the properties on the menu item or shortcut to find out where. In any case if you can't see this directory from the account you want to run NIS in the solution above should help.

I suspect I may be able to give all my users read access to the directory and then turn the feature back on, more on that later.

As a conclusion I really like NIS 2008. The performance seems fine, and I like the new interface. It does not seem to have integrated with my SystemWorks, but that is ok. I think 2007 did. This plus SystemWorks and I have my computer nicely cleaned up and ready for the new year.