Received the Casio Cassiopeia PA-2400W

The PA-2400W came like it was brand-new - still in the plastic with strips of paper to pull out of the battery compartments.

It came with the software and manuals, the adapter, the sync cable and the battery and a battery adapter. In fact, inside the device was the battery adapter with two AA batteries. I killed the batteries with synching up.

I can confirm that the PA-2400W model is Windows CE 2.11. I was still loading programs and haven't had much time to use it. The AA batteries conked out, and now I have the lithium battery in, charging up. The green light is on at the bottom showing it is charging. But I'm not able to turn the device back on ??? Is this usual?

The device has rather a strong backlight with the bright light lime green. You can adjust the contrast with a dial to the left side. When the batteries are low, the backlight won't turn on.

It comes with 4mb Ram and 4mb Rom ONLY. I popped in a 256mb card in the CF slot. It did come with an 8mb card - were they kidding?

I did load the Hum player and the sound is so-so. What other mp3 players can work on this device?

It also has a PCMCIA slot. I wonder how wi-fi will work???

It is a sleek looking little tablet. If it ever turns back on, I plan to take it to a meeting later this week and use it for taking notes.

Edited by quiche 2006-09-26 9:31 PM

Wow, only that much RAM and ROM? I am surprised CE 2.11 fits on that.. I'd never thought I'd hear about 4MB RAM is a CE 2.11 device.. Also, if possible, can you show us pictures of the device, as I have not seen it up close.. And, since your device runs CE 2.11, I would assume that WMP1.2 for HPC should work, unless the device has an SH4 processor
http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/s/0079.asp

my W has 8 mb of ram

tenjeangosi, hpc2000 eats about 2.5mb ram so i can imagine hpc pro on 4mb.. though it must be really pushing it

It's SH3, tenjeangosi. And mine has 8 MB RAM too. WMP should work - but, oddly, all the monochrome devices I have (even my Compaq Aero Pocket PC) seem to have trouble with mp3 sound. (Insufficient RAM, maybe? Or a slower processor?)

I take mine to meetings too, for the same purpose.

Re: not turning on
Make sure that you've moved the lock slider switch back into the locked position (the end where it says "Main Battery" rather than "Free" ) after replacing the battery - otherwise it won't turn on. Also, I've noticed that you have to press the power button firmly and hold for about a second to make sure it turns on. (Power-saving feature [preventing accidental turning on], maybe?) I'm using Micro Cheng's Power Toys for CE 2.11 on my W, and used that to set a sound to play immediately upon powering up - that way, just in case the contrast is out of adjustment and I can't see the screen right away, I still know it's on. An interesting "feature" that I've also noticed in both PA-2400 models is that sometimes when you press the power button to turn it off, it reverses shade (light text and icons on a dark background) and stays on for as long as a minute or two before powering off. (It'd be cool if we could figure out a way to make that reverse-shade effect happen while the device is on.)

Edited by CE Geek 2006-09-27 2:24 AM

yeah, i noticed it takes 1 sec of pressing the power button to turn it on. it is really device specific, the PC ephone-II requires the same thing so does the JVC MP-C33 then, intermec requires it for turning it off

I'll put up a photo I have tonight after work. In the meantime, I'm having problem loading programs. The device resets and the activesync conks out while loading a program.

Also the specs say 8mb ram and 16 rom, but I can't see the room. I do see it in WR-Tools on the tab with the storage card, but it doesn't show up in /handheld directory. I'm confused when I go to System I see 4mb storage memory and 4mb program memory - is that all the Ram?

yes thats all the ram, you can move the slider in the system ram info. didn't you know?

so where is the ROM? Because the specs on this device says there is 16mb ROM? Can I access that? Or is that the memory the sytem uses for running programs?

The ROM contains the operating system and any bundled core applications like Pocket Office and whatnot. It is totally separate from RAM. The ROM is exactly that: Read-Only Memory. Unless it's a flash ROM, there's really no way to use it as additional storage. That's why with these older HPC devices, manufacturers had to offer a physical ROM chip replacements to upgrade devices to newer OS revisions, etc.

The PA-2400W you have does indeed have 8mb of RAM total. Usually this amount is automatically adjusted as either storage or process memory is needed. So as you stated earlier, you have 4mb of storage memory and 4mb of memory available for programs/processes to run in.

You can manually adjust the RAM allocation in your Control Panel under System (IIRC), so that you can (temporarily, if it does indeed auto-adjust after time) for example provide more RAM for running programs than for storing programs/files in memory.

Edited by mscdex 2006-09-27 12:29 PM

So I think I'm getting it. Whenever you see ROM - it is not the program memory (which is what I had thought). You can't see the ROM and you can't store anything in there, unless it is Flash ROM. Correct me if I am wrong.

You've got it. (Makes me wonder, though, why they call it Read-Only Memory when you can't read it. [Before you correct me, I know what it really means - the device can read it but can't write to it.])

Re: device resetting during ActiveSync
When you say reset, do you mean it actually soft resets and goes back to the H/PC Pro desktop without you having to touch the Reset button, or do you mean that it powers off by itself? (Sometimes my H/PCs do this even when connected to AC power - I just go to Control Panel -> Power and select and then deselect "Enable Suspend while on external power." This always solves that problem.)

If you're saying that it resets itself completely, then a different question: Did you get the setup (ie, post-hard reset) screen when you first turned on the device? (If by chance it went directly into the H/PC Pro desktop, then maybe a hard reset will correct the problem.)

It does an automatic soft reset and comes back up to the desktop. It was still doing it this morning before I went to work.

A couple of more issues. I'm in a classroom while students are taking an exam. The room has fluorescent light - and it is very hard to read the screen - with either the backlight on or off.

Second, I've only had the tablet on, on battery power, a little over an hour - and it's with the lithium battery (which came with this mint condition, unopened device) and already the battery status is reading low??? My plan is to do two or three cycles on the battery - charging it up and running it down - because that's what I understand you should do with new lithium batteries. Isn't this device suppose to get more on-battery time than a couple of hours???

Update - the Casio only operated two (2) hours on the battery! As it gets to the low battery power level, the backlight will no longer turn on. I'm wondering if I will have better luck with AA batteries or with rechargeable NIMH batteries???

Re-reading the question, CEGeek - when I first started the device it did the setup screens. And while I'm now loading install programs through ActiveSync, it sometimes does a soft reset. I'm wondering if it is a conflict with PeoplePC software connection. I was having those kinds of conflicts with Earthlink, which is why I'm now trying out PeoplePC.

yeah well these grayscales have this problem indoors, they are good either outdoors or in darkness, but indoor light does no good usually.

your battery may be half dead from sitting for so many years