IrDA with Panasonic Toughbook CF-71

amy

Hello,

A few days ago I got an old, but still zippy laptop from my friend - Panasonic Toughbook CF-71 - and I'm going to regift it to my mum (she just needs Firefox, Pidgim, Skype, Evolution and really rarely AbiWord and Gnumeric).
I upped its RAM memory to the maximum (384 MB), exchanged its hard-drive (I had spare-parts from my old laptop just laying somewhere around, haha ), even repainted the case to the nice, Toshiba-like blue collor.
Then I installed  from the very scratch, making the configuration hardwired and installed the software packages just to suit my mum's needs (I didn't even install the printing support).
Then I found out, that she wants to take it for the holiday - she has Nokia 6610i with the IrDA port, and guess what? This very Toughbook CF-71 has the IrDA port as well! So I promised, that I'll set it up, so she'll be able to use GPRS to get her mail and work IM done during the break.
However, after a few hours of looking thru the manuals, reference files, etc I still couldn't figure out how to use IrDA on this laptop - I followed more or less this howto lt;codegt;community/IrdaHowtolt;/codegt; but it didn't work - and I checked out with most of the possible dongle code combinations, as well as both available COM ports.

Did anyone ever enable the IrDA on one of those archaic Toughbooks (I assume they have the same IrDA dongles)? I would appreciate any hints or instructions. I could use Windows to check out the IrDA supplier, but then I'd have to remove whole  (the old HDD is almost broken), what is not really a good idea IMHO...

Thanks,
Promethe