Plucker Causing Havoc with Palm Z22

[froggerz]

We’ve been using the Palm Z22 for paperless caching with Plucker for about a year and it’s been dependable–until today.

I uploaded a channel for the area we were planning to cache this afternoon. In the car on the way out to the park, I read through a few of the cache pages. Business as usual. I shut it off until we reached our destination.

We have the lower right button of the Z22 dedicated to Plucker. When we arrived at the park, I went to turn it on with the button and all I got was a blank screen. None of the buttons worked, the touchpad didn’t work, nothing. I needed to use the reset button on the back of the unit to reboot it.

The unit reset and I tried a bunch of applications, and they all worked fine. This time I tried to access Plucker through the menu screen instead of the button, thinking perhaps the button was the issue. Again, the screen went completely blank and none of the buttons worked, the touchpad didn’t work. Nothing. I tried rebooting it again and the trend continued.

When we returned home, I resynced it, hoping that perhaps it would fix the glitch, but the problem persists.

I tried http://www.plkr.org to post a problem, but even after creating a login, it wouldn’t let me post a bug.

Anyone have this problem in the past? Any ideas of what I can try?
Thanks!

[Ry and Ny]

When you hot-synced again, did you hot-sync the list or did you reinstall Plucker?

I don’t use either, but it almost seems like you got some sort of a corrupted file. I would

a) reinstall Plucker from scratch, then

b) on the PC, recreate the “channel” you synched to the Palm before using it again.

As mentioned, I don’t use either one, but these are the steps I’d take with any error with any software on any platform.

[EnergySaver]

I agree with the Ry and Ny suggestion.

While Palms seem to typically recover well from crashes (at in my experience), yours of course is not … likely since the last thing you used was Plucker, the crash that likely caused this messed up your copy of Plucker in some way.

It’s likely not the “fault” of Plucker, but the fact that it was likely your “active” application at the time.

FYI … I’m in the habit of hitting the reset button on the back of my Palm very often “just to play it safe”. I prefer to press it BEFORE I leave home … weekly if needed … just to keep things steady out in the field. As an example: I used Cache Mate instead of Plucker … every time I reload (sync) caches, I ALWAYS press the reset as the next step.

[Jeremy]

If you are still having troubles you might want to try a hard reset. There have been times I’ve encountered similar behavior, usually an application corrupting itself somehow, and fixed things by doing this. Note this will erase the entire contents of the Palm memory (including applications), but a HotSync should bring it all back. This initial HotSync will take a lot longer than normal as all your stuff gets restored.

To perform a hard reset of the Z22:

– Hold down the power button
– Press the reset button
– Continue holding down power button until “Palm Powered” screen appears
– Press Up to confirm the hard reset

Full hard reset instructions

Good luck… I want all the credit if this cures the problem, but I take no responsibility if it just makes things worse! 🙂

[froggerz]

@Ry and Ny wrote:

I would

a) reinstall Plucker from scratch, then

b) on the PC, recreate the “channel” you synched to the Palm before using it again.

Well, I’m usually apprehensive about taking the uninstall/reinstall approach, but felt I had nothing to lose. To be safe, I also followed Ry and Ny’s suggestion and recreated the channel, in case that was the issue–and it worked like a charm.

Everything is back up and running and so far, so good. We’ll see how it holds up to caching this weekend.

Thanks for the help

Mary of froggerz

[Ry and Ny]

Glad it all worked out! 🙂

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