Mark's Notebook

Palm Tungsten C and D-Link DI-624 Problems

While confined to the house and spending a lot of time in bed resting my hip, I've made a habit of using my Palm Tungsten C to check email and even surf the web a little bit. The Tungsten C has built-in WiFi (802.11b) and comes stock with a basic email program and a web browser that supports Javascript. I've used it in the past while traveling, but mostly as a novelty, "just because I can." (Of course, my wife thinks this is another expression of my nerdity. Why would anyone want to check email while on vacation?) But in this particular situation, it was actually quite handy and even liberating to check email without having to get out of bed. The Tungsten C supports the Graffiti 2 alphabet, but it also comes with a tiny keyboard that is marginally less frustrating than Graffiti. (I prefer the original Graffiti alphabet; the new Graffiti 2 alphabet supports two-stroke characters but with less reliability than the original.) So even for composing short email messages it is not too painful. I highly recommend this solution for those confined to bed.

When I got the Tungsten C, I also bought a wireless router to use as an access point. At first, I bought a Netgear router becuase I already had a very reliable Netgear router with firewall but no wireless capability. The new WGR614v2 with wireless capability should have been a drop-in replacement for my existing FR114P, but it never worked. I sent several emails to Netgear and I used their web site support form, but I never got a reply. So I returned the faulty router and bought one from their competition.

The D-Link DI-624 also would not function as a drop-in replacement for the Netgear FR114P. However, I was able to get it to function as a wireless access point by connecting both routers together. This actually is a good situation because

• I can still benefit from the Netgear's superior firewall.
• I can still use the Netgear's print server.
• I have more expansion ports available.

After having some minor problems with the web browser on the Palm, I checked all around for upgrades. Palm had a Tungsten 3.0 Update, and D-Link had updates from my current 2.28 to 2.42 and 2.50. However, after installing all these updates, nothing wireless would work. No connection, no email, no web, no ping. Since I have no other wireless devices, and I'm not driving yet, Mary kindly took me down to the local Denny's, where they have free wireless access. There, I was able to determine that the Palm was working fine; therefore there must be some problem with the router.

D-Link suggests that you back up your settings before upgrading the firmware. I dutifully did so. But after installing either of 2.42 or 2.50, I could not read those settings back in. I got a "checksum error" when trying to read the settings file back in.

Fortunately, the D-Link router allows you to "upgrade" from 2.50 to 2.42, and even from 2.42 to 2.28. After restoring the firmware to the 2.28 version, I was able to read my settings file, and now everything works again. Hallelujah!

But what about upgrading to the latest 2.50 firmware? Well, it is important to be able to restore all the previous settings. If this can't be automated by reading the previous settings file, then you must manually set everything as it was before. But many of the screens have changed! There are more options in the later firmware, and some options have moved from one screen to another. So at this point I do not know whether there was some setting I failed to set properly, or whether the 2.42 and 2.50 firmware do not work as well. Frankly, I'm tempted just to leave everything as it is now, since it all works again.

But maybe I'll take screen shots of all the current settings, upgrade to 2.50 again, then use the screen shots to root around and make everything as similar as possible. It does seem that one can fall back to 2.28 without incident.

But this is not the way these upgrades should work!

Here are support pages for these devices:

• Netgear FR114P router
• Netgear WGR614 802.11g wireless router
• D-Link DI-624 Revision C 802.11g wireless router
• Palm Tungsten C

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008