Improve your bluetooth HotSync experience

Using bluetooth to sync a Palm Tungsten device with the desktop PC is a very convenient way to keep the device up to date. For laptops without built in bluetooth radio, a USB bluetooth device such as the D-Link DBT-120 is a perfect match. But it's not small enough to keep it in the computer all the time, when the laptop goes down into the bag, the USB bluetooth devive must be removed. And as many other laptop users, we've been irritated with how poorly the Palm HotSync software manages to cooperate with the Windows XP bluetooth software. As long as HotSync isn't running when the DBT-120 is inserted, everything will work fine. But if HotSync is running, the Windows bluetooth software won't be able to create the virtual COM port that it needs becasuse HotSync is locking it. We found that the easiset way to keep out of the COM-port blues is to stop HotSync when the device is removed from the computer and restart HotSync after the device is reinserted. That way, HotSync and the bluetooth software is kept from locking the same virual COM-port. Perfect if you disregard the fact that it's annoyingly easy to forget to do it everytime.

And this is where MyTrigger comes in handy. Using MyTrigger's unique features it's less than a 5 minute task to automate this process. To try this you need a copy of MyTrigger, a USB bluetooth device and a HotSync installation. What's left to do now is to create a script that can start and stop HotSync and configure MyTrigger to call this script.

Create a script to control HotSync

With Windows XP, Microsoft added a lot of really useful commands to the command line parser, the one that's the most useful for us here is taskkill. Taskkill will send a WM_CLOSE message to the specified application to give it the chance to shut down gracefully, most applications do. If the application don't, taskkill can be run with the /F switch that will terminate the in a more brutal mannor, but we don't need to do that here, HotSync plays by the rules and shuts down gracefully when it receives the WM_CLOSE Windows message. So the command line script needed to close HotSync is really simple:

taskkill /im hotsync.exe 

Open notepad, copy and paste the above line in to notepad and save the file in a suitable location, we suggest C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Scripts\stop_hotsync.cmd. Next step is to create a script that can start HotSync again, it's even easier. On most computers, HotSync is installed in c:\program files\palm\. Older Palm desktop installations are usually installed in c:\palm\, you need to find out which one it is on your computer. Deperning on where HotSync is installed, the scipt to start it looks like this:

call "c:\program files\palmone\hotsync.exe

So open notepad again and save the above one line script in a suitable location, we suggest C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Scripts\start_hotsync.cmd. Now we have all the scripts we need to to accomplish what we want. Let's configure MyTrigger.

Setting up MyTrigger

If MyTrigger isn't already running, start it from the Programs menu. As soon as the MyTrigger icon shows in the system tray, right click on it and select "MyTrigger settings" to bring up the settings dialog.

On the "USB" tab, click the Add button to add a new trigger. If you know the exact name of the bluetooth device, you can type it in to the "USB device (friendly name)..." edit box. But if you're like most of us, you probably don't remember the exact name. So instead, insert the USB bluetooth and wait, after a couple of seconds, the "Last event..." label should change into something like this:

As soon as MyTrigger displays the last detected USB event, you can double click on the text to copy it up to the "USB device (friendly name)..." edit box. Easy as 1,2,3. The next step is to type in the full path to the start_hotsync.cmd in to the "Insert command" and the full path to the stop_hotsync.cmd script in to the "Remove command" edit box. Click "Save" and then "OK" to exit the dialog.

That's it, you are good to go. The next step is to insert and remove the USB bluetooth device a couple of times to verify that HotSync starts and stops as expected. If you don't see the expected behaviour, your best bet is to check the log file, that will almost always give you the clues you need to fix the problem. If not as a licensed user you can always send an email to support@torgesta.com.

Good luck!