Recently my son had noticed that I was reading eBooks on my BlackBerry Storm using MobiPocket reader. 
Since he and I share an interest in a lot of the same books, he inquired as to if he could do the same thing with his cell phone. Unfortunately his phone is not capable of running MobiPocket reader. I remembered that I still had my Sony Clie NX70V which in its day was a fantastic Palm device. 
And I used to use it to read eBooks with MobiPocket as well. The problem was that I was not sure I could get it working on a modern OS, all of our home systems are running Windows 7 of one version or another.
But I figured it was worth a shot. So I dug it out, charged it up overnight and the next day set about trying to get it to sync with my PC.
That turned out to be next to impossible on Windows 7. I could get HotSync to work, and the Palm Desktop software installed just fine, but the USB Drivers for the Clie would not install. I had the original CD to work from and spent several hours on the web trying various approaches.
I think the real problem was that I am running a 64 bit OS and the drivers were written pre XP days and there was just no way Windows 7 would work. Since I have Home Premium edition and since my processor does not support the hardware virtualization options, I could not run Windows 7’s XP Mode or Virtual PC which will no longer install on Windows 7 Home Premium. (Yes I am going to upgrade to Pro soon, but without the CPU support for virtualization that will only buy me a little bit.)
Since I am a developer I, I live in Virtual Machines, so I had found a virtual machine system that worked with Home Premium 64 bit Windows 7, which is Sun’s Virtual Box (Now Oracles' VirtualBox), this software was a snap to install, it’s open source, and supports just about every OS I have ever heard of. I have Windows Server 2008 R2, 2003 R2, XP, and Win7 all running in VM’s. It Supports snapshots and rollbacks, and most importantly for this article, it supports USB device capture.
So I fired up my XP virtual machine, installed the Clie software from the original CD, captured the Palm device on the USB menu, pressed the HotSync button on the cradle and voila! I had syncage!
Now, I just downloaded the latest reader software from MobiPocket, installed it to the Palm, got the PID identifier for the reader, added it to my Fictionwise account and downloaded the books I was interested in, synced them to the Palm and my son was happily clicking away and reading eBooks!
As an aside, I have a full SharePoint (WSS 3.0 and MOSS) including SQL Express 2008 with Reporting Services, installed in one of the VM’s complete with Visual Studio 2008 and all the SDK’s, Ajax, Silverlight and the v3 extensions for Visual Studio 2008 installed. I use it to develop and test SharePoint code. I have another VM based on XP that is an older Visual Studio 2005 based development environment for when I have to work with older code that I can’t upgrade. And I am building another VM now to investigate Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Virtual Machines are the best way to keep a focused development environment and avoid clogging your main system with beta’s and multiple versions of applications.
I tried VMWare’s products but found Virtual Box, faster, more reliable, easier to configure and maintain and much less resource intensive than anything from VMWare. And since I could no longer run VPC from Microsoft on Home Premium I could no longer use their product which used to be my main VM system.
Some takeaways from this little odyssey where:
- If you keep the hardware, hang onto the driver software! I found hundreds of forum posts while searching for a solution to get my Palm going from people that no longer had the original install media and therefore no longer had the all important drivers. And apparently you can not get them from Sony any longer. So hang onto those CD’s! (I made ISO images of both while I was at it and have them safely stored on an external USB hard drive as the CD’s do apparently go bad.)
- Virtual Machines are your friend! And not just for developers! A VM based OS is easy to setup and makes it possible to extend the life of older hardware and software, or just simply to be able to test software and devices in different OS configurations.
- Just because you have outgrown a gadget does not mean you won’t find someone or some use for it later. So if it is not valuable enough to sell, hang onto it, you may find a new use for it!
I hope this helps someone out there think of other ways to use VM’s, and if their are any Sony Clie NX70V users out there that need the original CD, I have an ISO image you can download! Just email me and I will work with you to get a copy!
Cheers,
Robert Porter