Rant: My 1998 Palm III would not sync with my Windows 11 laptop and it took me 9 hours to figure out why

Spencer Bell · 2026-10-09T21:30:05.516676+00:00

So I pulled my old Palm III out of a shoebox in my closet two weekends ago because I wanted to use it as a simple grocery list machine. The thing powers on fine, battery holds a charge, screen looks great. But when I tried to sync it to my laptop through a USB to serial adapter I bought for $18 on Amazon, nothing happened. No error message, no beep, just dead silence. I spent 4 hours thinking it was a driver problem, then 2 more hours blaming the cable, then another 3 hours reinstalling Palm Desktop like 6 times. Turns out the serial adapter needed a specific COM port setting that was buried three menus deep in Device Manager, and nobody on any forum from 2005 mentioned it because they all used real serial ports back then. Once I changed it to COM 1 instead of COM 3, the whole thing synced in about 4 seconds. I just sat there staring at my screen feeling like a total idiot. Has anyone else run into this dumb COM port thing with old PDAs, or am I the only one who lost a whole Saturday to it?

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Rant: My 1998 Palm III would not sync with my Windows 11 laptop and it took me 9 hours to figure out why | Dated Tech Love - Librear