Windows Phone Thoughts: Kiosk Carnage: First Aid for Pocket PCs

Call me a geek, but I've always enjoyed a good mosey through the aisles of office supply stores. The pens and desk accessories caught my attention at an early age, but as I grew older, I became increasingly fascinated by the harder stuff. Hardware, to be exact. When these stores started carrying computers, cameras and printers, my browsing time doubled.

Then, on a fine sunny day in June, when the birds were singing and the smog was making my lungs a lovely shade of brown, I noticed a new addition to the hardware aisles. Nestled snugly between the printers and the keyboards was a small display populated by a few interesting devices. There was a Casio Cassiopeia E-10, a Palm of some sort, and a clamshell Jornada. I was intrigued, but alas, none of the units worked. The Jornada had a broken display, the Palm wouldn't turn on, and someone had pried all of the buttons out of the Casio. :grumble:

Stores have gotten wise in the last few years, and have started protecting their hardware better - usually by putting them under plexiglas. This prevents most breakage, but does nothing to curtail that most basic of human instincts - the primal urge to poke at something shiny. When applied to Pocket PCs, this obviously leads to seriously ill machines. They are slow and unresponsive, their screens are dim, and they usually have about 20 programs running at the same time.

As a Pocket PC fanatic, I feel obliged to fix them. I work my way down the line of ailing machines, closing all of the running programs, turning the display brightness to maximum, and leaving each at the Today screen. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the machines are happier. :worried:

How about you? Have you ever administered first aid to a Pocket PC in need?