Acer N30 woes - software goes missing

[minion]

hey

a 'friend of a friend' recently asked me to have a look at his Acer N30 PDA. he bought it new (might have been from aldi) only a few months back. it came with destinator3 pre-installed. he told me one day he put it on and all his satnav software had disappeared.

seeing as destinator3 doesn't allow for the speed camera database POI's etc (he is an HGV driver), he got tomtom3 which i put in for him two weeks back.

all was great until i got a call today saying it had reset itself. i now have it back in my possession and can confirm that all data on the SD card is still there.

so, to my question. is anyone aware of this as being a problem in Acer PDA's? is it a known issue for their PDA's to have dodgy onboard memory?

looking at the procedure for a hard reset - i doubt he could have done that by mistake to wipe his data.

i am hoping he has only let the battery go flat without realising this wipes the data as it has now happened twice on a brand new PDA. i think this is the cause as he uses a bluetooth GPS Rx so may not plug the PDA into the cabin charger as he uses it - whereas if he had a wired setup then it would be plugged in all of the time.

any other ideas as to what it could be would be appreciated!

Acer N30.
WM2003 2nd Ed.
256MB 'Apacer' SD card.

[DavidW]

Most likely he ran the battery flat.

Sometimes a spontaneous hard reset does happen - I had one when I uninstalled Sprite Backup then soft reset too quickly on an iPAQ hx4700 and didn't allow the PIM mirroring time to stabilise. However, such occurrences are extremely rare.


The best protection against any kind of hard reset is Sprite Backup. This allows you to put a self-extracting backup file on a storage card. After a hard reset, all you need to do is run the backup file in File Explorer on the Pocket PC, and follow a few simple steps.

There is an evaluation version, allowing you to try before you buy.



David

[minion]

hey

i had a word and he has let the battery run flat after playing some games on the PDA in his wagon on a night. so i've given him a few tips such as - always plug it in when using it and if the backlight goes off then he knows it's not running on mains!

i am actually quite disappointed that the acer n30 doesn't have a battery low warning indicator. most, if not all, other PDA's i have personally used have this feature

anyhoo, problem solved (i hope!).

thanks for the tip about sprite - it sure would make a restore easier, as i may be getting a new battery for the 3870 soon.

cheers

[minion]

great - i spoke far too soon.

the n30 has completely froze up now and won't do anything, so i'm told.

i am starting to think this is another fault - apparently it won't even switch on which to me shouts out hardware fault.

i've told him to turn off bluetooth and see if that helps at all - battery charge is at 100% and it's never been online to pick up a boot virus or anything.

soft reset does nothing. apparently this has happened before and when it did eventually reboot the onboard ROM was reset.

anyone have any ideas?

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