Hey all,

I feel like a mooch registering and making my first post asking for help, but I'm kind of stumped and could use the help! I'm sort of the resident computer guy at work, but people tend to bring me their non-functioning Blackberries too. Unfortunately, I'm just not as knowledgable about BBs as I am with computers.

A friend of mine has a 8820 through AT&T. Our work runs a BES, tied to an Exchange server.

About once a month, my friend's BB mysteriously stops receiving e-mails (presumably, other data as well, though my friend only complains about the loss of e-mail). The signal strength shows normal signal strength, and EDGE is still in all caps. The fix seems to be running the diagnostic test, which send a registration message. Once the BB re-registers on the network, all of the e-mail comes flooding in.

The intervals between the interruptions in service seem sort of random (anywhere from 11 to 23 days so far). The BES guys swear that they're not doing any maintenance that would cause an interruption in service on the dates where we've noticed interruptions, but I'm not beyond believing that they may be trying to deflect blame elsewhere. The BES guys also say that his account looks normal.

Any ideas on where I should be looking for a fix to the problem? Should I be bugging AT&T? The BES guys? The Exchange guys? Broken BB?

Thanks in advance for any insight you guys can provide!

What version of the OS is on this 8800?

Here's the "About" information:
BlackBerry™ 8800
Wireless Handheld (EDGE)
v4.2.1.79 (Platform 2.3.0.74)
Cryptographic Kernel v3.8.4.34
MicroEdition Configuration: CLDC-1.1
MicroEdition Profile: MIDP-2.0
MicroEdition JTWI Version: 1.0
MicroEdition Media Version: 1.1
MicroEdition PIM Version: 1.0
MicroEdition File Version: 1.0

(I thought it was an 8820 - most people have them here - but I guess not!)

I would give it an update. That is a pretty old OS. A newer version may very well fix the problem.

I will give it a shot. Thanks!

and Welcome to the forums

Went to the RIM site, and this OS is the latest version available :(

Thanks, Sith! I will try to hang out some more here. Definitely need to brush up on my BB troubleshooting skills!

This is the latest version of 4.2 for the 8800:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/gene...ilanguage.html

And this is the latest version of OS 4.5 for the 8800:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/gene...dafone-de.html

Update to this -

We weren't comfortable loading a new OS that wasn't officially supported here, due to company policies. Oh well. We worked with AT&T and got a new 8820 shipped out to us, brand new, all of that.

Set up the user, configured, got everything up and running...

And bam. Today, the user went on a trip to a city about two hours away and came back. His brand new BB is no longer working - not sending e-mails this time.

I'm not sure if it's the user doing something to try to tweak the BB, but he swears he doesn't. I'm not sure if perhaps his frequent travelling is causing all these issues. But it is exceedingly frustrating.

Update to this:

I started tracking the outages a bit more closely, and found that a lot of these occur when the user flew somewhere. I asked, and it turns out that the user was not turning off the BB when he was flying. It seems that once the BB got out of range of any cell phone towers, the system lost track of the BB, and the system did not automatically re-register once he got back into range.

I told the user that he needs to turn off his BB completely once he is in the aircraft and to only turn it on once he is back on the ground. The problem has not reoccurred since then.

The outage I mentioned earlier where he drove two hours away was due to an Exchange server going down - obviously, with Exchange down, no e-mails were going to be sent.