[NTLK] Back to the fold

I was cleaning out my closet, plannning to sell all my old PDAs on
eBay. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of powering up my newton
2100 to clean it off and make sure it works (don't want to
misrepresent anything.) We'll that hooked me. I always frustrate
myself in one way or another with the newer hardware. You'd think my
Palm Lifedrive or Sharp Zaurus would keep me happy, but they're still
like dinosaurs compared to the Newt. (Don't get me wrong--I'd love
the Newt to be the size of the LD, with the 400mhz processor, color
screen and TCPMP to watch movies, but when it comes to the basic uses
of a PDA-note taking, calendar and address book, the Newt is still
way out ahead.)

Ok, so instead of selling it, I'm bringing it back from the dead. I
cant find the memory cards I had, but the battery is still good, and
I have the charger and serial dongle, as well as an ethernet and WiFi
card. The trick is the memory is wiped clean (I don't remember doing
that, but I must have.) So I need to at least get NIE on it.
Unfortunately, I've only got very new (intel) Macs with no serial
ports. So my question is given that, what's my best approach?

1. buy a new memory card on eBay from a seller that preloads the NIE
stuff. - The one seller I noticed (GEM) sells a 20mb on ebay for $50
preloaded. On their website the 20mb is $22 but says nothing about
preloading. Which makes me think I get a much better price just
buying an old cisco router flash card that doesn't have the name
'newton' attached to it.

2. find a PC, hook up temporarily install the software. Does the old
SW run in WinXP? I'd probably still need a mem card since I seem to
recall that the internal mem runs out quick (I haven't used it for 4
years, so my memory is rusty.)

3. Get a USB serial dongle and find some OSX software that can do SW
installs. There is the rub...Is there anything on OSX that can do
this? I remember NewtSync, but that required a package to be
installed before it would work so no go there. Is there anthing else?

4. Try to get SheepShaver running on my mac, try to get it to
recognise a USB serial dongle, try to get the newt docking software
to work. This seems like a long shot.

Am I missing any approaches? #1 seems the simplest, and least fraught
with risk. #2 might work. #3 would be the nicest since it would be
on my system rather than a borrowed one. But is there SW that can do
this? #4 seems unlikely.

thanks,

Geof

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