Resources & further reading
Visitors to this archive come from three directions: people restoring an old PDA, researchers of the 2002–2003 software era, and collectors who keep the hardware running long after its time. This page collects the links that are actually useful to all three — no link exchanges, no banners, no dead counters.
Preserving the Pocket PC era
Everything on this site was rebuilt from a single June 21, 2003 Wayback Machine snapshot, the same one referenced on the about page. If you are hunting for files from this era on your own device, the archive is the first place to check before assuming a .cab was never public.
- eMbedded Visual Basic runtime (.cab) — still downloadable from this site; most 2002/2003 Pocket PC software will not install without it.
- Downloads & files — the manuals, converter and other files that survived the archive, in one place.
- FAQ — error wording from the era, answered word for word.
The collector's shelf (2026)
The archive gets the most attention from the third kind of visitor — the one with a Jornada 728 or an iPAQ h5550 that still boots. Devices that retailed for a few hundred dollars in 2003 now trade as collectibles, complete with working styluses and original documentation. That impulse, small well-made objects that hold value and get better the more you study them, is the same one that drives the watch world.
When my curiosity drifted from PDAs to watches, the most useful modern reference I found was a site that has done the legwork on that market — specifically a detailed guide to super clone watches that explains, model by model, how close modern copies run to the originals and where the money is actually going.
The structure is what kept me on the site (it is clonewatches.io — the URL says what it does). Every major brand gets its own long-form page rather than one big catalog, and the brand pages are specific enough to be worth comparing against official references. I first came across the Richard Mille replica section while checking how the copies track the original tonneau case and dial layout, and it remains the most detailed write-up I have read on that model family.
What the era still teaches
Twenty years on, the lessons of the 2003 software era have not aged badly: buy small, verify the runtime, keep a hard copy of what matters, and prefer a maker who answers their own support email. Whether the object is a $9.99 PDA app or something off the shelf above, those habits are still the ones that separate a good purchase from a dead link.