Cleaning out the attic closet recently, I came across an ancient Casio PocketPC that I must have bought six or seven years ago, the Cassiopeia E-115. It’s a cute little device featuring a smallish, color touch-screen and compact flash card slot. My son was immediately interested in reclaiming it but we couldn’t get it to boot up or hold a charge.
A quick Google search landed a replacement battery (fully removable!) for about $20. That arrived in a few days and worked great. Next, we couldn’t help but notice that even though the Cassiopeia has a version of Internet Explorer, it had no way to get online. So another couple of Google and Amazon searches later, we located a compact flash slot-compatible wifi card by D-link, the DCF-650w, with drivers for Windows CE 3.0 still available for download. That came after a few days but how to get the wifi driver software onto Cassiopeia?
I tried loading them on a compact flash card but they wouldn’t install. A closer look at the driver software instructions suggested using Microsoft’s Active Sync program. I’m thinking at this point, too bad we threw away all the disks that came with Cassiopeia. Then again, exactly which computer in our house could still run Active Sync circa year 2000 even if I had the disks?
On a lark, I downloaded the current version of Active Sync from Microsoft onto one of our PCs, plugged in the Cassiopeia’s serial-port dock and plunked the little sucker down. Surprise, surprise, the 2007 Active Sync running on a Windows XP system recognized the Cassiopeia and installed the D-link drivers. Seconds later we were cruising the web, as the picture above demonstrates. Sweet.
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