X50V Windows Mobile Upgrade Experience

[jvenables]

Hiya Guys, I thought I would post some of my experiences of upgrading my x50v to the latest Windows Mobile....Both good and bad

Installing Active Sync 4.1 was as usual relatively painless & then I plugged in my device to perform the ROM upgrade. To be honest, it went very well the upgrade was completed in about 5-10mins with no problems incountered at all.

I then proceeded to install my base apps:- Pocket Informant(latest), Pocket Weather(latest), Pocket Breeze(latest), Contact Breeze(latest). These all installed painlessly - I really like the new feature that Active Sync doesnt ask where u want to install it, i.e. RAM, Built in Storage, CF or SD....That always was a pain I felt, especially at the PC level. However what it does now is once it gets to the PDA, it asks main memory or extra storage...I think this is a nice feature.

This is where the problems started, I found that my PDA was really really slow, It crashed very regularly.....even loading base menus seemed to take an age or just didnt happen.....my today picture corrupted.....I eventually performed a Hard Reset and havent touched it since..

I am really concerned that the upgrade has destroyed my machine, however I dont really want to revert back to WM2003se just yet.

some more testing and config needs to be done I think & I have been reading the Aximsite boards quite heavily as from what I can gather about 95% of all people who have done the upgrade have had serious problems...

Its a shame really.

Will post if I pluck up the courage to continue.

[bluevolume]

The simple facts here are that there are a LOT of issues running WM5 on our Axims. Some of them are problems in the build that Dell created, and some of them are in the OS itself. There are a lot of hacks/workarounds listed on this forum that provide some relief, but there aren't any real solutions at this point.

In the coming months Dell will continue to fix the problems at their level, and MS has committed to releasing fixes/updates for the OS. At some point this will all come together -- the OS, the Dell build, and the updated 3rd party applications. Its the same thing that happened with the x30's when they first came out. The whole 'landscape' feature was wreaking havoc with everything, and it took time for all of the parts to mesh again. Now, WM2003 SE is a very stable platform and works almost flawlessly.

The best thing to do at this point, assuming you need your Axim to be functional, is to go back to WM2003. That OS is really at its "sweet spot" right now - all current applications have been updated for it, and there are very few real problems. And "downgrading" doesn't necessarily take you out of the game; this forum is always going to be full of posts from those of us who keep hacking at WM5. You can follow the progress through the posts, and jump back in when more of these issues have been resolved.

[Jon C]

I went back to wm 2003 using the patch on Dell's website and it was trouble free. Dell says that the upgraded WM5 for X50v will be out mid-December.

[Marcello]

Not having a x50v, I can't really comment, but on x51v, I've really had no problems whatsoever with Windows Mobile 5 (granted I haven't used Bluetooth yet, so I haven't had a chance to experience problems associated with that). So either the hardware (RAM/ROM perhaps?) is faster/different, or they just screwed up the x50v WM5 upgrade thing.