Stage 3: Uninstall your old Palm Desktop
Once you've made your two desktop backups: the ZIP file of the entire folder and the copy of your user folder, it's time to uninstall your Palm Desktop.

Go to Add/Remove Programs, find the Palm Desktop Entry, as shown in Figure C, click Change/Remove and uninstall the Palm Desktop.

FIGURE C


Remove your old Palm Desktop. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Once you've uninstalled your Palm Desktop, there's another step you'll need to do. As you can see in Figure D, even though you may have run the Palm Desktop uninstaller, there's still going to be a whole lot of residual gunk left in your old Palm folder, including a bunch of DLLs and your user folder.

FIGURE D

There's still a Palm folder and it still has gunk in it.

Simply delete this folder completely. Drag it to your trash or hit your delete key. Be sure this folder is gone-gone-gone before you move on.

Stage 4: Installing your new device
Now that you've completely cleared your machine, it's time to install the new device. When I decided to install the new device, I did a hard reset on the device. This clears absolutely everything off the device that's not factory fresh. I did this because the new device had been though testing here, and itself might have had gunk on it.

You may not want to do a hard reset, although if it's a factory fresh device, it probably can't hurt. That said, some factory-fresh installs come with some add-on software and data, and if you do a hard reset, you may lose that data. Take care to check with the instructions for your device. If you do want to do a hard reset, you can find directions at the Palm Web site.

Other than following the manufacturer's instructions for setup, here's the one important tip for our clean reinstall process. At some point, as shown in Figure E, you're going to be asked for your user name. Be sure to enter the exact same user name you used on your old handheld.

FIGURE E


Be sure to enter the exact same user name you used on your old handheld. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Matching the user names is critical because you're going to want a seemless transfer of your old data, when the time comes. For the record, that time is not now.

Once you've completed the install process, you're likely to have done one or more HotSync operations, according to the installer's instructions. Ignore the fact that you don't have your old data on your handheld, and just check to make sure all the applications from the install process are set up correctly. Look at the HotSync log and be sure there were no errors. If there were any errors, fix them, even if you need to call Palm support to get some help.

In short, make sure your new handheld is functioning exactly the way it should be before you try to restore your data.

For the record, it took me three or four tries to get this to work. Each time I tried again, I started at the beginning, removing the failed Palm Desktop install, removing the user folder the installation process had created, and doing a hard reset on the device. You probably won't have to go through as many iterations. For example, the first time through, I didn't realize that the uninstall wouldn't uninstall everything. Eventually I got it right, and moved on the the next stage.