This stage of the process went smoothly, but there was a small error in the installation instructions.

The instructions say "Insert the Palm Desktop organizer software CD into your CD-ROM drive and click the Install button. When the Palm Desktop Installer menu appears, follow the instructions on the screen to install the software."

These instructions seem to expect that the AutoRun feature of Windows 95 is turned on, meaning that when you slide a CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive, a program called AUTORUN.EXE will be executed off the newly inserted CD-ROM. However, many systems have the AutoRun capability turned off and therefore the Palm Desktop Installer software won't run automatically.

If you experience this, you'll need to look on the CD-ROM for the file SETUP.EXE, located in the directory \PALMSFW\DISK1\ on your CD-ROM. Alternatively, an easier way to launch the Palm Desktop Installer program is to double-click on AUTORUN.EXE at the root level of your CD-ROM, which will get you back into the installer.

Keeping track of your applications
It's important to keep track of which applications you've installed on your PalmPilot. When you remove your old memory card, the card will lose power and all the applications you've installed on your PalmPilot device will simply cease to exist. As a result, after you install the new 2MB Upgrade card, you're going to need to reinstall all your applications.

The gotcha? You're going to need to have all the application install files ready to go on your hard disk. More important, you're going to need to know what applications to install. If you're like me, you've got a long history of adding and removing applications. Now is a good, ideal, even essential time to click your PalmPilot device's Applications menu and make a list (on paper, in this case) of all the applications you've got installed.

You should also go into HackMaster (if you're using it) and see if there are any hacks installed. If so, make a list of these as well. You're going to need to reinstall them.

Backing up your applications
It turns out I have an interesting problem. I've installed applications and hacks from a variety of different computers (including some test computers set up specifically for PalmPower testing), so it proved to be almost impossible for me to find the original application files on the PC or the Mac. If I don't want to lose all my applications (or spend days trying to restore find them all), I'm going to need to backup my applications to the PC from the PalmPilot Professional device, before I install the upgrade card.

I solved the problem by using a program called BackupBuddy, a program by graduate student Alexander Hinds. This program is smart enough to back up all of the applications as well as all of the databases. Will it remember to properly backup my HackMaster hacks? Stay tuned and I'll let you know.

I am a paranoid sort of guy, so I made a backup copy of my GewirtD folder, prior to running the BackupBuddy backup.