.FLYINGHEAD TECH SUPPORT INSIDER
.TITLE A guide to upgrading your organizer
.DEPT
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT upgrading-cover.gif
.SUMMARY 3Com should be applauded for always allowing an upgrade path from earlier organizers to the very latest device. Even if you own an original Pilot 1000, you can upgrade it all the way to Palm III functionality. In this helpful guide, contributing editor Chris Brown explains all the various upgrade options available, including how to identify various upgrade boards by their markings. This is a must reference for any PalmPilot device owner.
.AUTHOR Chris Brown
It’s hard to believe, but it has only been a couple of years since the original Pilot connected organizers made their debut. If you jumped on the bandwagon back then, you were probably the envy of all your co-workers. They were lugging around clunky day planners to meetings while you simply pulled your unassuming Pilot organizer out of your shirt pocket. They were even more jealous when they found out that you were playing Hangman during those meetings.
There has been much change over the past two years, and Palm organizers have gone from novelty to necessity. And while you’ve held on to your Pilot 1000, your co-workers decided to go one-up on you and got themselves newer PalmPilot organizers. And just when they thought they were on the cutting edge, your boss comes into the conference room toting a brand-new Palm III.
Jealous? Don’t be. There are plenty of ways to get yourself up to par with your co-workers and even your boss. There have been upgrade board options for Pilot and PalmPilot organizers since their introduction, and there are more very cool ones coming soon. The features of the upgrades can be rather confusing, so we’ll talk about them one by one.
.H1 1 MB Memory Upgrade
This was the first kind of upgrade that Palm Computing offered. Basically, if you had a Pilot 1000 organizer with 128 K of memory or a Pilot 5000 organizer with 512 K, you could replace your memory board and increase your memory to 1 MB. No new tricks, just more memory.
There are a couple of misconceptions about this early upgrade board. First, many Pilot 1000 and 5000 users thought that this was an add-on chip to the existing memory. In other words, people thought that you would be adding 1 MB more of memory on top of the 128 K or 512 K you already had. Since the upgrade replaced the original board altogether, this was obviously not true.
Also, this upgrade board was discontinued with the introduction of the 1 MB Professional Upgrade. "Professional Upgrade"? Was the old one "amateur"? Well, there was a reason to call it a "professional" upgrade, as explained below, but except for the slight difference in name, some people did not know what they were buying. Some folks were duped into buying the original upgrade board, thinking they had gotten the 1 MB Professional Upgrade. Others never knew that there were two different products.
.H1 1 MB Professional Upgrade
So why put the "Professional" in the 1 MB Professional Upgrade? After the introduction of the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional organizers, we didn’t want to leave any early adopters of the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 organizers without an upgrade path. The 1 MB Professional Upgrade replaces the memory board (including the ROM chip) on your Pilot 1000/5000 organizer or PalmPilot Personal organizer so that the memory capacity as well as the software is upgraded to that of the PalmPilot Professional. This is probably sweetest for Pilot 1000 owners, who not only get the biggest memory boost, but also the Palm OS 2.0 software and the PalmPilot Professional TCP/IP stack (making it Internet-ready and able to use the Mail feature).
What the 1 MB Professional Upgrade doesn’t do is give a Pilot 1000 or 5000 organizers the backlight feature that was new with the PalmPilot lineup. This was an early myth about the upgrade path that raised some peoples’ hopes too high. Many people were not happy about not being able to upgrade to a backlit screen, but there was no reasonable way to convert a Pilot organizer to support the backlight without gutting it entirely.
The 1 MB Professional Upgrade is still available from retailers who also sell PalmPilot Professional and Palm III connected organizers.
.H1 What’s the difference?
How can you immediately tell the difference between the original Pilot 1 MB Upgrade and the 1 MB Professional Upgrade? Well, if you’ve already installed one or the other, it will become apparent as soon as you perform a soft reset: The original 1 MB board will display "Welcome to Pilot" as soon as it is powered on while the Professional Upgrade board will display "Welcome to PalmPilot".
If, however, you were buying a board from the back of a truck (God forbid), and wanted to know what you’re getting before gutting your organizer, look closely at the board itself. The first and most obvious indicator is the copyright date on the lower right-hand corner of the board, on the side where the chips are attached. If you see a date of 1997 or later, you have a 1 MB Professional Upgrade board. If you see a date of 1996 or earlier, you have the original 1 MB Upgrade board in your hand.
If you still want to be sure, look at the circuit pattern on the board. Even if you are not an electrical engineer, you can tell that the original 1 MB Upgrade has pin connections for what seems to be an additional chip to be installed. You will not see this on a 1 MB Professional board, and you may even see a sticker placed in the gap between the second chip from the left and the ROM chip to the right of the board.
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