What the 1 MB Professional Upgrade doesn't do is give a Pilot 1000 or 5000 organizers the backlight feature that was new with the PalmPilot lineup. This was an early myth about the upgrade path that raised some peoples' hopes too high. Many people were not happy about not being able to upgrade to a backlit screen, but there was no reasonable way to convert a Pilot organizer to support the backlight without gutting it entirely.

The 1 MB Professional Upgrade is still available from retailers who also sell PalmPilot Professional and Palm III connected organizers.

What's the difference?
How can you immediately tell the difference between the original Pilot 1 MB Upgrade and the 1 MB Professional Upgrade? Well, if you've already installed one or the other, it will become apparent as soon as you perform a soft reset: The original 1 MB board will display "Welcome to Pilot" as soon as it is powered on while the Professional Upgrade board will display "Welcome to PalmPilot".

If, however, you were buying a board from the back of a truck (God forbid), and wanted to know what you're getting before gutting your organizer, look closely at the board itself. The first and most obvious indicator is the copyright date on the lower right-hand corner of the board, on the side where the chips are attached. If you see a date of 1997 or later, you have a 1 MB Professional Upgrade board. If you see a date of 1996 or earlier, you have the original 1 MB Upgrade board in your hand.

If you still want to be sure, look at the circuit pattern on the board. Even if you are not an electrical engineer, you can tell that the original 1 MB Upgrade has pin connections for what seems to be an additional chip to be installed. You will not see this on a 1 MB Professional board, and you may even see a sticker placed in the gap between the second chip from the left and the ROM chip to the right of the board.

Oh yeahÐ the original 1 MB Memory Upgrade comes in the old purple and white Pilot packaging and the 1 MB Professional Upgrade comes in the multi-colored PalmPilot box. If you are buying a used card, however, chances are you won't see the original box.

SuperPilot Memory Boards and other TRG upgrades
Okay, if you can't get enough games to fit alongside your hundreds of Address Book entries, you might want to look into getting a SuperPilot Memory Board from Technology Resource Group (TRG). These upgrade boards can boost you to 2 MB and all the way up to 8 MB of RAM (whoa!). Most of them are PalmPilot Platinum certified at the time of this writing, so they've been tested to work well to Palm Computing's standards.

An interesting characteristic of the SuperPilot boards is that it does away with the ROM that your Palm OS software is stored in. Instead, the SuperPilot boards feature flash memory, much like that of the new Palm III organizer, to store your Palm OS data. "Non-volatile" flash memory is not cleared if you perform a hard reset of your organizer, so you don't need to worry about losing your system software if you need to clear out your RAM for some reason. Since the Palm OS software does not take the entire 2 MB of flash memory on these boards, you can also add other applications that are protected from performing a hard reset as well.