The screen on my Palm Zire was becoming scuffed and scratched, and I’d thought several times lately that I might want to replace it before too long.

This evening, while leaving the office, I dropped the Palm. I didn’t realize until I got home that I had broken the LCD screen. So I got back into the car, drove all the way across town, and discovered that neither Wal-Mart nor Radio Shack carries the Zire anymore (or any other PDA — but I wouldn’t have wanted a more expensive model).

At Wal-Mart, for $30, I bought one of those Royal pseudo-PDAs that tracks your schedule and contacts and synchs up with your computer but isn’t versatile or programmable like a Palm. No big deal, right? All I really need is the calendar and the contacts. Sure, I’ll miss the solitaire, but there you go.

Well, I have been completely unable to get the Royal unit to synch with the computer over its USB cable. Every time I try to plug the USB cable in, Windows says it’s a USB Bridge and tries to find a driver for it — and even though I ran the installation software and have left the CD in the machine, Windows says it can’t find the driver anywhere.

So I called Royal’s customer support number. I was connected to a fellow somewhere in India who assumed I was a complete idiot and tried to walk me through very basic Windows functions. And I probably sounded like an idiot, because I had trouble understanding his particular accent. He finally directed me to a place where I could download the drivers for the PDA. I did, although they seem to be the exact same ones that I found by exploring the installation CD. In any case, Windows still won’t recognize or install them.

While the support fellow was walking me through things, he had me look at the settings for my USB ports on Device Manager. He expected me to see something there called a MegaWin USB driver, and it wasn’t. So maybe that’s the problem. If so, I don’t know where to get it or how to install it.

I think I am giving up for the evening. Maybe on Sunday, after my two speaking engagements and the symphony hall opening, I can call my computer-savvy brother in California — the one I can’t seem to go visit — and pick his brain.