I still carry around that vintage Palm V that I still haven’t replaced by a smartphone to carry around things like my address book and some access codes (heavily encrypted).
Since I moved my email/outlook to my newer Presario X1005 laptop I was a little bit annoyed though… that laptop has no RS-232 serial port! Thus, I cannot connect my vintage Palm craddle and cannot hotsync my email address book no more the way I have been doing it for years…
I thought it would be wise to buy an USB to RS-232 adapter… but these aren’t actually easy to find. I finally got one on eBay, but that piece of crap came with an unverified XP driver… and I think there’s a reason for that: the device worked properly only twice over about 50 desperate attempts…
Then, I remembered that RS-232 ports may have been heavily replaced by USB ports but IR ports have not been wiped out by Bluetooth yet… That sounded so easy I wondered why I hadn’t thought about IR earlier! Morevover, I had done that kind of IR sync before on an NT 4 laptop!
Well, it isn’t quite as easy as it seems… that IR port just wouldn’t act like a serial port, so there was no way to get the palm hotsync manager to listen to it! Huh? Why that? It worked on NT 4 a few years ago!
A few days later I finally realized that I needed a missing brick over the IR port driver: a virtual COM port driver!
Luckily, the open source community has produced such a thing: http://www.ircomm2k.de/english/
Even better: it works like a charm! B)
Now I just wonder: did I install something like that on NT 4? Well, now that I’m thinking about it… I have a vague memory that I did… oops..