Skip to main content

Conflict and Workaround: GPSProxy, HP iPAQ hx2490, and the Virtual COM Port Driver

My younger brother has been wanting to use GPSProxy + Garmin Que on his HP iPAQ hx2490 Pocket PC which runs Windows Mobile 5 (WM5). We'd had no luck during the past few months trying to get this configuration to work.

First there is a serious conflict between the Thai language software SmartThai such that GPSProxy fails to load when SmartThai is enabled -- i.e. its shortcut exists in \Windows\StartUp folder. We disabled SmartThai and got GPSProxy successfully loaded but the next problem is that its Virtual COM Port driver always fails to load.

The problem is that the HP iPAQ Bluetooth Software takes up all available COM ports, and GPSProxy Virtual COM Port cannot be loaded nor initialized. I tried several hacks, which include using a registry editor to delete a virtual COM port key allocated by the iPAQ bluetooth software. Unfortunately, these keys are protected by the operating system and cannot be deleted.

Well...today...by chance...we found a way out.

The solution:
  1. Turn off Bluetooth before launching GPSProxy.

  2. Once GPSProxy is launched then turn on the bluetooth signal. In this way, the iPAQ Bluetooth software will spare the COM ports allocated by GPSProxy.

  3. Now we can start the Proxy Engine flawlessly.

We've tested this workaround many times this evening, with both GPSProxy V1.16 and V2.2. So far it works!

In fact my younger brother told me that he's had this kind of conflict between the iPAQ Bluetooth driver and some Internet-enabled software. Disabling Bluetooth before launching a software is his favorite trick!

Hope this workaround is useful for you!


Keywords: , , , , , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Padonc's "Bought from Mae Hong Son" T-shirts -- Interesting Souvenir from Mae Hong Son

Padonc's "Bought from Mae Hong Son" T-shirts -- Interesting Souvenir from Mae Hong Son The "I love New York" t-shirt and the series of souvenir was one of my impressive memory from my previous trips to New York City. I got this same kind of impression when I was browsing by the shops by the Jong Kam Walking Street in the city of Mae Hong Son in the second night of the trip. I didn't look at the seller when I caught the sight of these T-shirts. The seller greeted me and, surprisingly, she was P'Kwan, my senior alumni from Chulalongkorn University, who lives in Mae Hong Son and gave me a warm welcome when my family and I went for a dinner at Fern Restaurant in Mae Hong Son town the other night. Note: Pi or P' (its abbreviation) is a Thai word to call an elder sister or brother. Here are the pictures: P'Kwan and Her Shop The T-shirts P'Kwan and the Shop P'Kay, P'Kwan's Husband, at Another Shop Keywords: trips , mae-hong-son , thai
1 comment
Read more

Tip: Converting a CSV File into XML by Excel

I came across a problem to convert a historical data in comma-separated format (CSV) into a modern & more useful XML format. There are many ways to do such conversion. The most obvious one is to do it programmatically by writing a program to read CSV data and exporting it to an XML file by means of the Simple API for XML (SAX) or the Document Object Model (DOM) libraries. But I was too lazy to do it. I knew that Microsoft Excel 2003 supports exporting worksheets into XML data. I tried it out but found that it is not that simple -- we have to define an XML schema and bind each element to each column of the worksheet. So I went on researching. Finally, I found a very useful tool on MSDN: Excel 2003 XML Tools Add-in Version 1.1 ( download ). The Excel Add-in's "XML Tools -> Convert a Range to an XML List" menu command allows us to simply select a range in a worksheet (with or without first row as column names) -- with the advanced options to specify the XML root
Post a Comment
Read more

It’s been eight years and here comes COVID-19 in early 2020

This blog was last posted in 2008 before Facebook and LinkedIn went mainstream. I have since then socialized and posted a lot on Facebook and LinkedIn. During the global COVID-19 crisis in early 2020 people dramatically change the way they live and work since they day I last posted on this blog. They stay a lot at home during the great lockdown to prevent the spreading of the coronavirus. Here is a summary of my online presence: Facebook: http://fb.com/drthitiv LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/thitiv LINE: http://line.thiti.it Bangkok, THAILAND April 22, 2020 
Post a Comment
Read more