Today I rebuilt my iPAQ

Today I rebuilt my Hewlett-Packard iPAQ h4150 Pocket PC PDA. What can I do? ActiveSync quit on me (typical crapware). I don't know what happened. One day it was working fine syncing all my database with Outlook 2003 and the next I did not.

Uninstalled and reinstalled ActiveSync - did not work. Finally after looking up Microsoft's Knowledge base and found that nothing can help me I decided to do the hard reset. So I spent three hours of my time reloading all the applications I had on my iPAQ. I kinda glad I did - I managed to clear up 700k of junks left over by demo programs that were not uninstalled properly.

The problem is - if HP ever ever ever release a Windows Mobile 2003 SE for Pocket PC ROM update on my iPAQ I would need to rebuild again. This is my third rebuild since acquiring this model in April and it is not something you would like to do every now and then. For PalmOS veterans - a rebuild on a Pocket PC is much different than a rebuild on a PalmOS device (PalmOne, Sony Clie etc). It requires the device to be connected through ActiveStink and a manual one by one installation process (like on the desktop). Shit isn't it? Imagine if your desktop got formatted and you needed to go through every CD to reinstall every piece of software - that is how it feels like.

One thing I did find out is when I hard reseted the PDA - there were still left over database file name left on the iPAQ. Not good HP! Security wise it should have been better.