Psion Series 5 Organiser

Description

Psion series 5 uses binary coding for floating point arithmatics.

PsiWin

PsiWin is the default application for synchronising your Psion with your desktop PC. PsiWin was written in the days of Windows 98 and NT. Needless to say it was all but sure that is would this work on Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

Because I have Windows Server 2003 running on my laptop, this was the first test candidate. Installing PsiWin is not completely flawless. Right at the start there is a severe warning, but you can click through it. Luckily after that all goes well. After plugging in the Psion and firing up PsiWin, the connection works perfectly.

Synchronising with Outlook 2003 also works as you would expect: nice and fast. There is an issue with some calendar items, especially recurring items. Some of those don't get transfered to the Psion. I have not figured out why yet, but I will get back to this. Contacts synchronise okay, as far as I can tell at the moment.

Next test candidate will be Windows Vista on my desktop. I'm very curious to see if it will connect to my Psion 5. Check back here soon!

PsiWin and Vista

I started with downloading the latest version of PsiWin at mypsionsupport.com , which is version 2.3.3 at the time of writing. It's about 25MB in size.

Unlike on Windows Server 2003, there are no errors or warnings during installation.
The first connection between PC and Psion failes however, but this turns out to be an incorrectly set COM port. After switching COM port in PsiWin all goes well.

I quickly set up 2 synchronization actions:

One for my Contacts and Calendar and one for my E-mail. The Contacts and Calendar synchronizes perfectly. E-mail syncing results in the error "EPOC Mail. The EPOC Mail Server interface failed to initialize."

I don't have any e-mail applications installed on my Series 5, so the Psion can not find anything to synchonise with is my guess. This is something I have to dive into.

Blue screen

Then I try to disconnect my Psion. I select Disconnect appropriate tray icon and I get a blue screen (BSOD - Blue Screen Of Death). The error message states IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
So, there you have it... Synchronization works perfectly, just do not ever disconnect your Psion again :) But realy I don't think most of you have to worry. I bet it's the driver of my USB to Serial who's to blame.
For the record, I'm using 32-bit Vista Ultimate.

Update 2008-08-27: Seems at least one other user has the same BSOD problem. It may be a problem of PsiWin after al. Any informatie is welcome on this subject!

dCalc

dCalc is a great RPN calculator for the Psion 5, 5mx and Revo. dCalc has a lot of features, including financial, scientific and programmers functions. If you care about a good calculator for your Psion, definitly have a look at dCalc. dCalc was developed by Bob Hepple between 1999 and 2002.
As of 2002 dCalc was released into the open source community. Download the dCalc source code (ZIP file, 170kB).

Links

User guide (pdf, 2.8MB, slow connection!)
PDAStreet forumarchive

Pictures

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