It is useful in some situations, but it draws a fair amount of power from the battery and reduces autonomy.

You can turn this feature off from the Prefs/General panel; but on Palm OS® 4.x machines, the "Beam receive" preference is often unexpectedly reset to "On", even when the user has explicitly set it to "Off".

Purpose
This utility allows you to keep the "Beam receive" preference always off, and thereby increase the autonomy of your handheld.

Usage
IrOff requires PalmOS® 4.0 or higher (it has no purpose on previous versions).
Once the PRC file is hotsynced to your handheld, launch the "IrOff" application, and check the "Keep beam receive off" box.

The counters at the top of the screen display the number of times that IrOff checked for Beam receive preference, and the number of times it actually changed it from "On" to "Off".

IrOff is automatically reactivated after a soft reset.

Known Bugs
IrOff has been reported to crash the Clié PEG-T675C at reset (under investigation).

Licence
IrOff is freeware. You are allowed to distribute it as long as you don't charge for it or alter it in any way.

IrOff is offered in the hope that it will be useful, but the author can not be held responsible for any damage that would occur from its use or the impossibility to use it.

Comments, suggestions
olivier@palmattitude.org

*** [Nov 30, 2003] by RW Jones
Installed a couple of days ago on my Sony PEG-N770C/U which has PalmOS 4.1. Does not entirely remove the problem - IR still resetting itself to ON and I am trying to identify what events make this occur, one seems to be that it resets to ON after charging battery - IRoff does not toggle beam to off again then. Looking at IRoff log, it says there have been 44 activations of the app and 4 toggles to OFF.

Overall this program seems more successful at handling the problem than the two others I found, Beamfix and Beamoff (both useless and one is charging US$5 shareware). Given its freeware status, if I can identify what events precede the failure of IRoff to reset to OFF, it wouldn't be too bad then to have to remember manually to re-set after e.g. charging. But for US$5 a working solution would be more acceptable - or better still, a FIX from Palm who are the party responsible after all.

***** [Oct 1, 2002] by hogs
Thanks for having done.... what Palm should have done !! Furthermore it's free ;-)