I figured it’d be a good idea to update the firmware and ROM on my iPAQ, so I checked out the HP downloads site, and sure enough, there were updates available. I downloaded the following updates;

• HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5500 Series Firmware Update
• HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5500 Series ROM Update

intending to update the BIOS and all on-board stuff to get me up to date. I didn’t bother with the Bluetooth manager update, or the WLAN update, because it appears that those things are included in the BIOS updates. So anyway, I install both the firmware and the ROM updates, which results in clearing everything off my iPAQ and having to reinstall everything from scratch.

No problem I figured, I’ve done this on my Palm before, and everything (applications etc) just got transferred back the next time I synched… apparently not.

So I synch again, and it wants me to create a new profile on my desktop, because I haven’t named my device back to the same name as I had it before (“jane”, named after the computer-based lifeform in Ender’s Game!). That’s no good – I want it to synch back the same stuff, same data, same details etc. After playing around a little, I decide that I’ll go whole hog, so I close down ActiveSynch, get into the registry and start hacking around to move all the new settings which I’ve just created as ‘jane2’ and change them over to point to the other directories etc (‘jane’). Then I change my device’s name back to jane again, and see what happens.

At this point, everything appears to be fine – it actually works, and it’s synched all the old data back, and looks like it’s accepted me as an imposter jane… sort of, or something. Wonder if this is an exploitable way of stealing someone’s data? All I really did was created a new profile, then hacked the registry and pointed it to all the same directories as the old profile…

On top of that problem though, now I have a bigger one – WiFiFoFum doesn’t appear to work!

I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the hackery that’s gone on, I can’t see why it would be, because that was more to do with synching and my desktop machine, I didn’t do anything dodgy on my handheld. I can only assume that this means that there’s some sort of problem with the new ROMs and the way that WFFF is coded. According to the program, when it tries to start up, there’s this problem;

WiFiFoFum.exe
MissingMethodException

WirelessManager::Init+0xc
Form1::.ctor+0xa2
Form1::Main+0xa

Hopefully the guy who writes WFFF can figure out what’s going on there and can fix it, because in the meantime I have no warstrolling toys again :(. Once I get my GPS unit, then I’ll really wanna be able to get out there again, so until then it’s not too bad, but then there’s no GPS support in WFFF yet either, so that’s not really an issue is it?…