Palm Centro: Documents To Go Registration

My Palm Tungsten had a nice feature called Documents To Go that allowed Excel spreadsheets (and Word, et al) to be modified and synchronized with a Windows desktop. When I found that Sprints version of the Palm Centro came bundled with the product, I was very please. Everything worked flawlessly, until about a month ago.

The Centro displayed a notification that there was a new version of Documents To Go, and I should click "OK" to be automatically upgraded over the air. Being a good user, I clicked "OK". The upgrade bumped me up to V10, then prompted for the Registration Number or Activation Key. Of course, I had neither, so by handheld dropped to the eval mode. So sad.

Contacted vendor DataViz. Waste of time. Contacted Sprint. One very smart lady suggested I redownload the software from the Sprint website and reinstall. Good idea! Unfortunately, it wanted a Registration Number or Activation Key, also. Called Sprint again. Waste of time. They didn't have the keys.

At first I though I'd delete the application and install the Tungsten version.

1. Press the Home key.
2. Press the Menu key, and select Delete...
3. Scroll to "Documents" and click Delete.

I decided to factory default the box and start over. And a funny thing happened-- It didn't work, yet it fixed the problem. Here's what I did:

*** WARNING *** HotSync First ***
1. Remove back of handheld.
2. Pull data card.
3. Press and hold the red power button on the front of the phone.
4. When the screen goes black, continue to hold the power button, and remove the battery.
5. Say the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" ryhme.
6. Insert the battery.

When the handheld booted, I expected it to have lost all my info, but it was still there. Further, when I went to Documents To Go, it was back in the registered mode. It seems the reset as listed above replaced the factory default binaries, but left my data. Yeah!

The moral of the story: Document your registration number:

1. Press the Home key.
2. Goto Main, select Documents.
3. Press the Menu key, and select Options.
4. Scroll to Registration Info...