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Palm Tips: Reseting, or, How to remove misbehaving drivers, patches, and applications
Tue, 31 Jan 2006

(I resisted the title "Drivers, patches, and applications - oh my!")

Thanks to our friend the light bulb everyone is familiar with the on/off switch; anyone whose used anything more complex is also familiar with the crash and the reset cycle. Technology should be more stable -- when is the last time you saw your VCR or microwave oven crash? -- but we all know that it has been a long time since the days when Palm OS users could make jokes about the blue-screen-of-death to Pocket PC users.

But many people do not know about the many flavours of reset; most people know about the 'soft' reset (what I call the Pinhole Reset to keep it straight) and some unfortunate folks know about the 'hard' reset, there are others though it is out of scope of this posting to talk about the debug reset and the PleaseDon'tFormatMyLifedriveHardDisk-reset, but I will mention a third very useful variation..

Common Reset Types

Soft or Pinhole Reset -- the one everyone knows; if your device crashes or gets weird use a pen or paperclip to push the button in the pinhole in the back of most devices. Don't use a pencil! (pencil tips break, and you really don't want conductive graphite inside your device do you?)

Warm Reset -- this is the one most people don't know about, but that can be really really handy sometimes. Push the pinhole reset while also holding page-up (or up on your 5-way controller) until the Palm (or whomever) logo comes up. This reset reboots the machine as a normal reset, excepting it doesn't invoke "start up jobs" (laymans term.) If an application is causing reset loops or does something undesirable when the device restarts than this will usually save you - giving you an opportunity to repair things. Something that used to be semi-common was T|T5 users installing the T|T3-Only patch that PalmOne released .. a patch for the T|T3 OS would break the T|T5 since PalmOne didn't check to ensure which device it was on; Anyway, such OS patches cannot normally be removed since the OS is using them but with a warm reset, you're able to remove lots of good little files in RAM (using Filez, say) that you normally couldn't touch.

Hard Reset -- this is how you clear the device, more or less restoring it to factory settings. (Unless you've modified the flash or hard disk or other nasty things.) Pinhole reset while also holding the power button on the device until the main logo shows up. Don't do this for fun :) The OS will confirm the wipe, first.

Removing undesired patches, applications, etc.

First, run your backup applications; see my previous Palm Tip :)

The 'warm reset' description above pretty much nails it. Install Filez (a freeware file manager, like Windows Explorer on a desktop Windows application), or use ZLauncher, Resco or some other file browser. There are dozens. Do a warm reset, and then using the file manager wipe out the troublesome application.

Reset again -- a pinhole reset, no fancy stuff. It is important to always reset after a warm reset, just to make sure everything is back in normal operation mode, not warm mode.

If you still cannot remove the driver, app, etc, after a warm reset.. then it is either in flash memory or ROM (not removable without being evil), or .. you need to do the hard reset. Not such a good option, but can be highly workable. Of course, one option is to do a Backup, then hard reset, then do a restore of everything except the troublesome files, but that can be tedious.

I'll make another Palm Tip soon to describe the best way to do a Hard Reset without making a lot of work for yourself. Handy for cleaning out a device, and for migrating to another device.

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