I'd recommend against using NiCad rechargeables. These lose their power rather quickly, even when not in use, and because of the way their "discharge curves" (don't ask) work, your Palm device will give you little warning before they suddenly die. One morning, you might awake to discover that your Palm unit took a few too many sleeping pills.

You also might want to buy another cradle so that you can HotSync at the office as well as at home. Life has probably inflicted a PC upon you in both places anyway, so you may as well get some benefit out of them. By performing HotSync operations with two PCs, you will always have an emergency "storage dump" for your data.

Speaking of which, is this Palm device stuff safe?
Yes, as long as you protect your data by performing a HotSync every day. This is the most important thing you will ever do with your Palm device. I'm regularly amazed at the number of people who almost never HotSync. No electronic organizer, even your Palm device, is perfect. And sooner or later you are going to lose data. As I said last month, more than once I've lost ALL the data in my PalmPilot. But it's no big deal -- because I HotSync regularly. Just drop it in the cradle, and all your data is back, as long as you make sure that the first time you perform a HotSync after losing all your data that you customize the operation, specifying "desktop overwrites handheld".

Of course, by "safe," perhaps you're referring to the "Dark Side" of the Palm, when people start to give you that look. You know, the one that says, "Gee, I never knew she was a...GEEEEEEEEEEK!!!"

Hardcore technophobes will shun you. Regular folks will figure you're the Daniel Boone of the electronic frontier, and might ask you to fix their PC when Windows crashes. (Try turning it off and then on again.) Worst of all is if a tech type at the office spots you. It's like gasoline on a fire. Pretty soon they'll be dropping issues of Pen Computing in your mail slot. You'll be asked to participate in office "power user" surveys. And the computer support people, who had previously treated you like bacteria, will suddenly start saying things like, "Do you have a TCP/IP stack in that thing?" (I have no idea what it means either, but say no. They'll go away without breaking anything.)

But hey, it's worth it. You'll see.

One last thing on the safety issue. As an absolute last lifeboat, you should periodically copy your Palm "user directory." This is the directory on your PC's hard drive, usually located at c:\palm\<your name>, that stores all your data. Every week -- or any time you do something that seems a bit risky with your device, such as a software update -- copy the whole directory into another place on your hard drive. Anywhere is okay, as long as it's not under c:\palm. That way, if all else fails, you'll always have a fairly recent copy of your data to turn to in case disaster strikes.