Over the last two years, we’ve had a number of Palms trickling into our environment. These, of course, have their own challenges as far as tech support is concerned.

One of the more frustrating issues I’ve had to resolve with Palms is problems with Hotsyncing. On both Macs and Windows based machines I’ve run into problems where one day the Hotsyncing is working fine, and the next day, the Palm and the computer can’t communicate with each other.

After much puzzling, I’ve discovered that the culprit is often corrupt NVRAM on the computer that is messing up the computer’s USB ports. To reset it, do the following:

Mac: Restart the Mac and zap the PRAM. To do that, hold down the apple-option-p-r keys during the startup sequence.

Windows: Resetting the NVRAM is going to vary by manufacturer. All I can tell you for sure is that on a Dell OptiPlex GX260, you enter the BIOS by holding down F2 at startup. When you are in the BIOS editing screen, you turn on the scroll lock, num lock, and caps lock. Once all three are on, you hold down the alt key and press E and that will clear the NVRAM. Check the documentation of your machine to figure our how to do it on the specific machine you have.

Happy Hotsyncing!