Read my husband's Palm (Zire)

February 5, 2006 6:48 PM

Please help my husband with his Palm Zire 72 randomly spazzing out and shutting down.

My husband notes:

"Big problems with my PalmOne Zire 72. The OS is a Palm OS 4.0, I think. I bought it when the Zire 72 had just come out, maybe 2 years ago.

Basically, the first problem was when it wouldn't recharge. I plugged it in, but the green light wouldn't come on and it wouldn't recharge no matter how many times I wiggled the cord. My wife got it to work, I don't know how [wife notes- I don't know either. I wiggled it].

Then, it just started crashing: the display would slowly fade to white, sometimes with 'vertical stripes', and it would stop responding. I would then turn it off, and it wouldn't turn back on. When I pressed the reset button, it might come back to life, but often I would have to completely re-install everything. Shortly thereafter, the whole fade/crash/reset would start again.

Since it wouldn't hold a charge along with other problems, I tried replacing the battery. This seemed to help at first, but then fade/crash again... AND now it won't respond to the reset button.

Ugh."

Any ideas as to what this is and how to fix it? Husband is fairly handy with opening electronics up and noodling around, but he would like to know if anyone has any idea what he is looking to do once in there.

NB- the warranty is up, and Palm wants something like 150$ just to look at it.

posted by oflinkey to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Not that I know anything specifically about this device, but my geek instinct says that there is something wrong with the circuitry that monitors the battery -- particularly as you've already tried replacing the battery itself, so that's unlikely to be the source of the problem.

Have you tried an 'in-cradle reset'? Or even just a hard reset?
posted by chrismear at 11:39 PM on February 5, 2006

My Palm 72 has had the exact same problem. I've had it for about a week over a year and used to use it all the time. I agree with chrismear, and that is what I detirmined to be the problem with mine.

I've given up on PDAs now because of it. I've had a PDA since the Newton OMP making my Palm 72 the sixth PDA in a decade for me. Now I've moved my calendar and phone book to my iPod and I use my cellphone for anything else that I might need.

the only thing I miss is the SuDoku game I had on my palm. Giving that up has been tough.
posted by DragonBoy at 6:32 AM on February 6, 2006