Kinoma Notes

Ah, the new year. A fresh start whose arrival is greeted with fire­works, a hearty ren­di­tion of impro­vi­sa­tional lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, everyone’s best inten­tions, and a baby wear­ing a top hat and strategically-placed sash.

Many of us who’ve used Palm OS for awhile use the new year as a reminder to do what I call a grade-and-pave. That’s when you com­pletely wipe your phone, and then restore your appli­ca­tions and data from scratch (not from a backup).

Why?

Well, the best Palm OS soft­ware (like Kinoma Player) makes your phone’s over­all reli­a­bil­ity a pri­or­ity. It fol­lows all Palm OS soft­ware best-practices, mak­ing it very unlikely that it could ever cause prob­lems — like crashes and unex­plained slow­downs — with your phone as a whole.

Unfor­tu­nately, not all Palm OS soft­ware fol­lows those rules. Even some pop­u­lar Palm OS soft­ware hacks the OS to pro­vide fea­tures that the OS itself doesn’t sup­port, such as “fake” multi-tasking. Over time those hacks tend to accrue, con­flict and cause sys­tem prob­lems. Some­times, just unin­stalling the culprit(s) isn’t enough.

A grade-and-pave is a fresh start for your phone.

#1: Hot­Sync

Check your Hot­Sync Set­tings to make sure that the Backup con­duit is enabled, and then do a Hot­Sync to back up your phone.

#2: Wipe your phone

In Palm OS lingo this is called doing a “hard reset”. Palm has an arti­cle that shows you how to do it for your par­tic­u­lar device.

• Palm Knowl­edge Library: How to do a hard reset

Note: This will delete every­thing from your phone, includ­ing Kinoma Player!

#3: Archive your old data

If you sim­ply restore every­thing that was on your phone before, there’s a good chance you’ll inad­ver­tently restore apps or data that were caus­ing problems.

To avoid that, move or rename the “user data” folder that Palm Desk­top keeps your stuff in. I nor­mally rename mine with the date and zip it, and then even­tu­ally delete it when I’m sure I’ll never need it again.

On Win­dows, your user data folder will be in in C:Program FilesPalm, and will be named the first six char­ac­ters of your Hot­Sync last name plus the first char­ac­ters of your Hot­Sync first name. For exam­ple, Angelina Jolie’s user data folder is called “JolieA”.

#4: Hot­Sync

Now, do your first Hot­Sync just to make sure the basics are working.

Since you archived your old user data, you’ll be asked to cre­ate a new Hot­Sync pro­file. You can (and prob­a­bly should) use the same pro­file name that you used before.

#5: Rein­stall Kinoma Player

To rein­stall Kinoma Player, go to our lost key form and enter your reg­is­tra­tion email address. You’ll be send an email with a link to a fresh installer, which you can use directly from your phone.

Tip: You can just click the link on your phone to install Kinoma Player over the air, with­out a PC. I typ­i­cally for­ward the link to my phone via SMS.

#6: Rein­stall other apps, as needed

Rather than auto­mat­i­cally installing every­thing that was on your phone before the grade-and-pave, install them as needed. And when pos­si­ble, use your phone for at least a day or two between installations.

By fol­low­ing that advice, you’ll get a clear under­stand­ing of how dif­fer­ent soft­ware affects your phone’s per­for­mance and stability.

#7: Enjoy!

A good grade-and-pave gets you a like-new phone expe­ri­ence with­out spend­ing any­thing but a lit­tle time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma Player, Troubleshooting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.