Yesterday, just as we were starting out on a car journey into deepest, darkest London, my iPaq 2790 decided it would refuse to connect to my TomTom GPS receiver. Having worked perfectly less than 2 weeks ago, it was now complaining about lack of memory.

Specifically, “The Bluetooth Radio failed to turn ON due to insufficient driver memory available”. Hmm. Fortunately we were only 1/2 a mile from home when we realised it wasn’t going play ball, so we went home. “It will only take 2 minutes to fix”, I claimed.

I was wrong.

A Google search only resulted in pages that seemed to think that the problem was the order in which software gets loaded into memory in Windows Mobile 5.0; the Bluetooth drivers always get loaded into a specific memory address, and if this address is already in use, the drivers don’t load and the Bluetooth stack doesn’t work.

But uninstalling everything from the iPaq and performing a million hard resets didn’t work. I decided that the Bluetooth hardware had broken, and Windows was giving the above error message by default.

So I resigned myself to buying a new PDA, because I lost my iPaq restore CD in a previous incident, and had no way to reinstall the OS from scratch.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a page for the 2790 on hardreset.eu, which describes the way in which the 2790 can be restored to factory settings; just hold the Calendar, Messaging, and power buttons, and then press the reset button until the iPaq reboots. It will then reformat its internal storage, and (presumably) copy the factory configuration from a neatly tucked away back-up ROM.

And now it works. Bluetooth, I mean. It works. It wasn’t broken, it just had an unidentified problem (which may or may not have been accurately described by the error message it caused).

I can now safely venture past the end of our road without the risk of getting lost.