Desktop Software for PC

[Andyalfa]

Sorry for not getting back to you last night, but I abandoned the task for the evening having had enough for the second night on the trot.

I think you may right when you suspect the usb port. I tried a little experiment this morning. I brought the usb cable in to work and connected via a spare port on my works laptop. A bit naughty really, since we've not even supposed to have our phones in work at all. Anyway, the device was detected, then windows automatically searched for drivers, found them and installed them. According to device manager in Windows, the Blackberry Smartphone was there and ready for use.

I think I now have two options. As the usb 2.0 card in my home PC is one I added, I shall try plugging the phone into one of the usb 1.1 ports that were there when the PC was originally built. It may be slow, but at this stage, I really don't care. It may be a long shot, but worth a punt.

Option 2 is to sweet talk our PC hardware guy at work and persuade him to allow me to load up my Palm Desktop software, hotsynch my Treo, then load the Blackberry Desktop and let the device switch wizard do it's thing on a standalone PC here. I only need a one off transfer of contacts, appointments, memos and stuff. Once it's on the Blackberry I'm up and running.

All in all, I have to say I like the phone more than I thought I would. The email and internet setup were far less complicated than when I did the same on my Treo and some of the features I can see I won't be able to live without very quickly. Once this desktop manager thing is sorted, I could even become a proper convert after 6 years of being a Palmtop junkie.

Needless to say, I shall let you know if/when/how I finally get this problem resolved.

[JSanders Resident Expert · Accepted solution]

Good luck with whichever option you pursue.

[Andyalfa]

Progess so far is promising. I rebooted the PC and the 8900, then connected it to the usb 1.1 port. When I saw it in Device Manager as working, I loaded the Blackberry desktop software and it was CONNECTED!

After several minutes of synchronisation, I was ready to try the device swith wizard. Now I hit problems.

Firstly, the prompt windows appear in a different language. Not quite sure what it is (Swedish, East European?) but definitely not English.

Secondly, I connected my Palm device (working according to device manager) and fired up my Palm Desktop software. Starting the switch wizard and following the prompts as best I can, I get to a box which has a radio button to select Palm Treo Desktop Software, but it was greyed out. I know the Palm is connected because I was able to perform a Hotsynch to make sure everything was upto date. I know the Blackberry is connected, because I just ran a backup of the files on it.

Selecting Swithc between Blackberry devices brought up a menue with nothing greyed out, it's just the switch from another device option which fails.

I can't believe it's so close after all this time!

[Andyalfa]

Brief update...

I found on another thread in the forum, that the switch wizard doesn't work with Palm Desktop v4.2. So, I removed that version and downloaded/installed v4.1.1e. Now when I fire up BB Desktop Manager and follow the foreign language prompts, the Palm Treo option is selectable and I am now working through lots of other prompts, (taking a guess that Tolak means Next for instance) and synching my Palm data to my Blackberry. The process now seems to have finished, yet none of the information is actually on the hand held at this point.

Disconnecting the handheld, then switching around the applications shows my contacts, calendar etc. Looks like it's worked.

Incidentally, using Google Translate, I put some of the words in and the nearest language it foud was Indonesian. Seems I am fluent in that now too.