Been torqueing lots of hardware lately. After my sync catastrophe, my Blackberry refused to sync more than 3800 or the 7100 contacts on Exchange. So I had to wipe and rebuild it. Forgot a bunch of lessons, but to review, if you have to do this:

# Download the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager
# Make sure you select Control Panel/Mail and make sure the profile is set to Always connect directly. Make sure it is not set to cached Exchange mode and Blackberry needs a live connection. The default is Office 2003 is Cached mode which doesn’t work. So you have to muck with the profile
# When you connect the Blackberry after the wipe, it will automatically over the air activate it and you will get your calendar, contacts and mail from your Exchange account. You can check progress by looking at the Enterprise Activation icon on your Blackberry. It will take a couple of hours for 7,000 contacts to sync.

I also was trying to upgrade my TomTom 720 and I also installed audible 4.0 to try to get audiobooks, Audible 4.0 just rebooted the machine which corrupted and bricked my TomTom, so how do you get it back. A good post on this previously, but it is pretty simple:

# Start your TomTom and plug it in. The low level firmware will make sure that the flash in the TomTom looks like a flash drive
# Delete all the top level files *but not the folders!*
# Now reach deep into Tomtom’s program directory (c:\program files\TomTom2Home on Windows) and delete the download directory
# Start TomTom Home and it will think that it just has to update the device, this puts all those files back!
# You are good to go!

Also, if you noticed there is a new 715 map available and they want to nick you $99 to buy it. Wow, that’s a great business. If you have the map, then if you want to do a manual install, you have to futz if you don’t get the maps right. “TomTom Forums”:http://www.tomtomforums.com/showthread.php?t=8084&highlight=map+install says all y ou have to do is to find where maps usually are installed and copy your map copy there. That is usually , HOME/downloads/map/North America

If you stuff a map there, then the TomTom Home application should be able to find it when you click on Add Maps and will put it on your TomTom. There is apparently a magic activation file called the “.dct”:http://www.tomtomforums.com/showthread.php?t=5965&highlight=manual+map+install file which contains the activation. If it isn’t right, you won’t see the map even if it is inside the right folder on your TomTom.

I’m Rich & Co.

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