HP iPAQ 211 Enterprise HandheldOne of the first rules of writing email that we learn is to never hit “send” when angry. This is important to keep friends and family from shouting obscenities at us, and it’s especially important in business where such powerful emotions as rage must be tempered in order to create a “positive work environment.” Considering how some of the previous angry posts on this site haven’t really gone over well, I’ve decided to follow the same rules when posting articles online. The nice thing about this is that I have time to compose something just a little bit better than just another angry rant like we can find anywhere on the internet. This is probably a good thing for both HP and the people at Microsoft, as my recent rages regarding the frequency of system hangs on my HP iPaq 211 has become something on the excessive side.

It all started the day I received the unit back in late April. Naturally, I can’t accept a new machine without doing a factory reset, or installing an OS of my choice from the original CDs or DVDs. It’s not that I don’t trust the equipment manufacturer to put the software I need on, it’s that I don’t like all the superfluous stuff that typically gets added to an installation. Either way, what happens is that when I am in the middle of using Word Mobile heavily, sending or receiving huge emails (more than 100 KB), doing anything with the file system (deleting lots of big files, or moving several smaller ones), or accessing media from the SD card for more than 40 minutes, the darn system freezes on me and I lose whatever data hadn’t been manually saved.

More often than not, this often happens when I’m in the middle of using Word Mobile to write reports or continue my novel while listening to mp3’s. What really pisses me off about this, aside from the fact that it happens, is that I cannot find anyone experiencing similar problems in any of the internet forums or websites dedicated to technical problems or reviews of this hardware. Am I the only one that experiences these problems? Am I using the machine far more than it was intended to be used?

The Daily Reset

For the last month or two, I’ve been resetting the device every day before heading off to work. It’s a funny routine, really. I have the system check the mail, get the latest RSS feeds, then *beep* … reset. This affords me the advantage of having updated feeds and whatnot as well as an empty memory buffer. When I do this, I can normally go about a day and a half to two days without trouble, which is why it’s done daily. However, since the summer heat has started here in Japan, the problem has been getting worse. It now seems that the system needs to be reset whenever it’s been used for more than four hours in a day. Four hours? How the heck am I supposed to keep track of when the four hour mark has been reached when I’m in the midst of updating complex Excel files, writing hundreds of words in Word, talking to somebody via MSN (which shouldn’t be used to begin with) or writing posts in Embink?

Before the suggestion that I remove Embink from the system comes up, I’ve been having this trouble for a month longer than I’ve been writing and testing my mobile blogging application. Heck, I’ve even done a factory reset a few times to clear the system of everything and start over from scratch. But even when I leave the portable device with just the default applications and settings, it cannot last more than two days without a reset. To the best of my knowledge, the only time it will give me more than three days of un-interrupted operational time is when the machine is left on the charger … off … while I’m not using it because it’s the weekend.

So what the deuce? My 5 year old HP iPaq 2210 could go a whole month without a reset, and that thing runs the very same software that’s installed on my 211!

I’m really at a loss as to what might be causing this problem. As I had mentioned earlier, I cannot find anything about this online aside from some HTC Touch users that complain about a problem with Windows Mobile 6 when they do certain phone-specific actions. Since my iPaq is clearly not a phone, and I’m not using the mobile phone version of Windows Mobile 6, I shouldn’t have these same issues … right?

I’ve asked HP tech support for a little information on this, but they tell me to just reboot the system whenever it hangs … as though I don’t do anything that even warrants saving once in a while. Perhaps if I just played Solitare, Jaw Breaker, Tetris or some other game, this wouldn’t be such an issue … rebooting would be no different than starting up a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. But this is my enterprise-grade mobile computing device that was specifically chosen because it’s an enterprise-grade mobile computing device. If I can’t rely on the machine to do what I need it to do on a regular basis, then why does it carry such a heavy price tag? Heck, perhaps I would have been better off going with a cheaper model or, heaven forbid, buying a Palm III XE … the device that got me hooked on mobile computing.

I’m hoping that some kind of update is made available soon. Either for Windows Mobile itself or, at the very least, for Word and Excel Mobile. If the system is going to crash this often, then I want the Mobile Office applications to automatically save my data every 10 minutes.

This post was published using Embink 0.1 Alpha-1.