We admit it. Your Palm organizer isn't perfect when you pull it out of the box. Hell of a sales pitch, huh? Actually, that's one of the good things about it. As with anything, there is always room for improvement with your 3Com connected organizer.

I talked about this last month when I wrote about upgrading your organizer by replacing the memory board seated in the back of the device. Replacing the board makes for dramatic changes in the functionality of your device, but what if there are any incremental updates to the Palm OS software running on your organizer? What if there was a bug that needed to be fixed? Would we make you go out and buy a brand new board? Of course not! Similarly, we couldn't get away with making it difficult for you to upgrade your version of the Palm Desktop software, right?

Plug the following URL into your web browser and bookmark it: http://www.palm.com/custsupp/downloads. This is the spot that you'll come to when you're looking for the latest updates and upgrades of the Palm OS and Palm Desktop. It's a no-charge, one-stop shop for you, whether you're using a Pilot 5000 device with Pilot Desktop 1.0 or a Palm III device with Palm Desktop 3.0.

Of course, with the broadening range of products that Palm Computing introduces, it can be confusing to figure out what is appropriate for you to download from the Palm Computing website. I'll give you the scoop on what you should download and why.

No Pilot is an island
Okay, before I get into the nitty-gritty of this, I'm going to launch a sermon to you all. If you are reading this right now on your monitor, I probably don't have to worry about you. If someone went and printed this up for you because you don't have a PC of your own, I'm talking to you. What are you doing with a Palm organizer if you don't have a PC?!

I know that there is a lot of rhetoric out there about your Palm organizer as a handheld computing solution. Not that this isn't true- the thousands of developers out there for the Palm Computing platform is a testament to this- but in no way is your Palm organizer meant to stand on its own, independent of your desktop system. There is a reason for the cradle and the CD-ROM in the box, and they really should not be treated as optional accessories! Without synchronizing with a PC, you are risking data loss should anything adverse happens to your organizer. You are not able to use any of your data in conjunction with any other applications on your PC, such as your e-mail client or your word processor. And forget about playing Klondike in those boring meetings--unless you are able trade applications with other users with the beaming feature of the Palm III organizer, you won't be able to make use of any software besides what is already pre-installed on your device.