Database Users

New TyTN owner: disappointed with freezes

I've been a long term HTC fan, having had a Cingular 8125 for over a year. I just got a TyTN and immediately added a 2 G micro SD card and then loaded that up with software: uBook, NewsGator Go for blogs, Egress for podcasts, SBSH Weather, and MortPlayer. It was very unstable, freezing about half a dozen times a day. Doing a little research, I found that the presence of a micro SD card was implicated in freezing. Freezing is where the phone part of the TyTN continues to work (green light continues to blink), but the Windows part is locked up. I've removed the weather and Egress items from the Today screen, and so far that's reduced the freezes to once a day.
I would like the Hermes to be as reliable as the wizard which went weeks without me resetting it. I'm currently on ROM 1.18.255.3. Is moving to a new ROM version likely to fix this freezing problem? Are there people out there using a 2 G micro SD without a freezing problem? I understand there's a new ROM due out at the end of January, should I hold off till that comes out?

I mean to add that I have a HT636 serial number in case it is hardware related.

Aha! evidence indicates micro card
By removing various software from the today screen, there was no reason for any software to look at the micro card. The phone had not crashed, and yet the file manager showed that the micro card was not present.
But this stinks, I got the phone so it would hold a gigabyte of stuff, mostly podcasts.
At least can feel confident in the problem. Any chance it could the SANS micro SD card?

Not sure why your file explorer is saying there is no micro-sd card.
I use the same card as you and do not have as many hangs as you.
Some things to be aware of.
Best practice suggests putting in main memory anything that is used on the today screen or by phone application. In other words anything the device would need on coming out of sleep mode is best placed in Main memory.
Everything else can be placed on the SD card.
If you do not use push email you should carefully apply the "fake server" trick
You probably are, but you must use a task manager (say magic button or the like) to properly shut down applications.
I personally steer clear of today plugins that automatically connect to the net for data - e.g. weather/traffic/news type programmes.
Mike

Thank you for your ideas.
I guess I was spoiled by the 8125. Perhaps that it uses the regular SD instead of the micro-SD is the reason. All my apps on the 8125 were on the storage card, and I didn't force applications to quit.
I guess I just need to accept that the TyTN is more touchy about the card and try working around it.
Thanks for the feedback.

I did the same as you, added a 2 gig card from the start. I have journal bar running for weather and news, loaded in main memory, everything else is on the micro SD card. I had the same lockups as you are seeing but it's not the microSD in my case.
I found that the phone "wakes" often for calls, notifications etc. while in it's holster. When it wakes all keys are "unlocked" and subject to getting pressed. From this forum, I applied all the patches and tweakes like Auto-lock on power up, PTT button re-mapping, and many registery tweaks for bluetooth accys.
Mine almost never hangs now. The main culprit now seems to be when connecting/disconnecting it to a charger sometimes turns off bluetooth or hangs the unit, but it's intermittent.
Overall I'me very happy now, till "Kaiser" comes out...

Thank you for the info. I'm going to move the sensitive applications to the main memory. Do you think the ROM version could be contributing to the failures? I have 1.18 and I believe there is an official 1.35 out that is later.
Thanks

Another Way to Speed Up your Hermes
This Might Help You Making Performance of your Hermes Better
WM5_Tweaks_Performance
Espacially by:
Enable FileSystem cache
Increase FileSystem cache
Increase FileSystem filter cache
NOTE: These Tweaks Helped Me ALOT.....

Thanks for the ideas about tweaks. I'm going to see how stable I can make it before applying any of them.

applied all of them and it does seem significantly faster now.

I'd definitely recommend the ROM upgrade, I have never experienced the silly lock ups that I used to since.

I just experienced my first freeze on my Vario II (UK).
I got the phone on saturday, and used it for the first time as an alarm clock yesterday and everything was great (sunday I forgot to turn it off silent - boo that you have to remember).
This morning my alarm didn't go off, when I woke up the phone had frozen and wouldn't display anything - but the light was still flashing. I haven't got a MicroSD yet.
Would I have the latest ROM as I have only just got the phone? If not, how do I upgrade or find out what version of the ROM I have?

i am on the std rom released by imate in australia 2.3 i think. i have used many including xdaII and the universal.
the current hermes is the most reliable, most stable, and most amount of uptime with the best battery life, so overall i am very happy.
by the same token, i have been here long enough to know exactly what needs to happen to totally rebuild these devices from the basic rom to a device that works efficiently.
it is vital that you apply all things that are required or used during the initial startup, including things in the startup directory, and on the today screen to be present in main memory.
i have also found that icons on today or in start menu that are loaded on an sd card can slow the device down.
having memory readers on the today screen, reading the SD card memory isnt good either.
using and going through a lot of the registry hacks are useful, but not necesarily for the speed, hangs, but for functionality.
also, custom applications that are installed on the sd card i move out of the program directory to a sub directory called custom apps. this is simply to ease the speed of opening, and when i open custom, i accept a minor second or two delay rather than immediate.
i did have (not recently) have problems with the system loosing the sd card directory, which a soft reboot fixes. which is all the more importance of hiding the icons and applications from day to day interaction that use the SD card.
you can also look at reformatting the card.
i also did find that doing a full back (SPB) and doing a restore speeded up the device noticably.
there may also be speed issues if you dont synchronise regularly, and the notifications queue on previous devices also caused problem, but havent found much here.
doing other simple stuff like error reporting, disabling bluetooth auto beam is also a good start.
using ring tones or themes that are on the sd card are also not as reliable than locating in immediate ram.
so rule of thumb, you need to be able to boot up and use your device completely independently of your SD card, and only access the storage card for apps that you call for, and for data that isnt needed immediately on boot up, to store songs, files, documents and related types.
hope it helps. but in answer to your question, if you can get a more updated rom, you will definitely get a benefit, but quantifying the benefit is hard. new roms are released for a reason, so consider them seriously.
that said, if you dont need to wait for a supported rom rather than crossing platforms, this is always difficult and should only be done with extensive knowledge. as such, i dont have that many problems i cant overcome, and so am waiting for the official imate rom to be released....
hope it helps with some ideas and areas to consider
S.

ben2004uk; have a read of the wiki, it's all there should you wish to upgrade. It is fairly simple.

Freeze's gone
Ok, I feel a lot better. I've moved the one critical today add-in (weather) to main memory. I've only occassionally accessed the external storage. But with that configuration I now was able to go about 5 days without a freeze!
So I conclude that the storage card is not waking up quick enough or something like that. Other people have said it, but don't put any "always running" or "today related" software on the storage card.
I'm still on 1.18 ROMs, but I think I'll hold off for a while before upgrading. I just don't feel like rebuilding the machine right now.

how to determine ROM versions.
ben2004uk said:
I just experienced my first freeze on my Vario II (UK).
I got the phone on saturday, and used it for the first time as an alarm clock yesterday and everything was great (sunday I forgot to turn it off silent - boo that you have to remember).
This morning my alarm didn't go off, when I woke up the phone had frozen and wouldn't display anything - but the light was still flashing. I haven't got a MicroSD yet.
Would I have the latest ROM as I have only just got the phone? If not, how do I upgrade or find out what version of the ROM I have?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It took me the longest time to find this as the wiki did not address it. go the start menu, then settings. Then click on the system tab at the bottom. Select the Device Information control panel. Now go to the TyTN wiki: http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Hermes_Upgrades
and review your options. At Feb 1, 2007, 1.35 appears to be the latest official one.

Devices gets slow

Hello all,
I experience the following problem with my Tytn (gory details about versions and so avail upon request): With age the device got slower and slower to the point that now e.g. ActiveSync times out if the device was not soft-reseted for a long time.
Still, even after a soft-reset the device feels sluggish and unresponsive -- compared to what it used to be.
Granted, it has a boatload of software installed but the "slowness" got worse w/o adding new softw.
IIRC from the old PPC days the old WinCE used to suffer heavily from memory leaks, and the only way to recover from that was to hard-reset the device.
My question is:
- Did anyone else have this experience ? Is it a known problem ?
- Is it actually a appl problem and not WM5 related ?
- Does a hard-reset and restoring from backups solve the problem ? Or do I neeed to hard-reset and install the software all over again from scratch ?
TIA,
Florian
P.S. Sorry I don't have some "hard facts" (mem usage/whatnot), so far it is just an empirical observation

When I originally got my device I tried installing a load of software and this seemed to eventually break the device. It does start to perform slower the more you mess with it. I upgraded the firmware and was careful about what I installed and the device works great now.
If you performed a hard reset and re-installed your applications, you would notice an increase in speed. I recommend the latest firmware also.

i have just replied to similar comments that may help here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=291882
rather than retyping. the bare device works really really really good, so it may relate to your apps. install standard released apps, with care, and do backups regularly to restore if necessary.
also, i have found in the past that large volumes of contacts and large amounts of diary syncs does slow all devices down. one poster said he had over 1000 contacts and wanted to know why phone calls were slow to start (caller id and searching duh...)
so watch what you install, and only install what you really need
install anything that is needed on bootup into memory
hide icons point to your sd card
dont have sd card readers on the today screen
follow the registry hacks and use them
dont install today screen stuff to sd card
accept that the sd card may be disabled or fail on occasion, thus you dont want your device functionality tied to it otherwise card fails, device fails
manage your synchronisation of data
there is soooo much more. make sure you are on the latest released rom for your device. ensure your sd card does have fast read and write ability...
read wiki, do some research. all else fails, HARD RESET and see if it runs at normal or good speed. then test each and use each app carefully, using a backup app to restore as you need to.
this is m$, and i equate wm5 to windows 95, we are a long way from xp status, so play nice, be gentle, and manage the apps you install, they way you install them, and the data u need.

clean riegistry hive

hi. i have a blue angel and upgraded it to wm6. it has worked great for about a month now. i have installed a lot of apps in it too. now my question is, speed has began to slow down now, like when i open messaging, it takes a long time to open, and im wondering if cleaning the registry hive would do the trick. i tried using some registry cleaners but nothing seems to be fixing the problem. i was wondering if i cleaned the registry hive when i do a hard reset, would the programs already installed have problems too? i dont wanna format the storage coz i dont want to go back to zero again. i think its just a program incorrectly installed or uninstalled doing the problem, but i cant find whats causing it. so im thinking, it could may only be the registry. i dunno. help me please.

you cant do that... by cleaning only the registry hive, soon your installed applications will not work properly, the reason for slow down device might be incompatibility of the apps...

The reason for slow performance on your device is lack of memory available on your storage. Also, please go to PIE and delete your files from options section.
The programs that you have installed on your device also uses the memory therefore it won't be as speedy as it would be when the device was just flash.

i see. actually, i cleared my registry hive once before, when i experienced the lost pasword. i didnt want to do a total hard reset so i just chose no on reformat rom and just the clear registry hive. but that was just a few days after i upgraded to wm6 so there were only a few new apps on my fon, so i wasnt worried of any problems yet. i did install explode's cabs though, and all seemed to work just fine, i just reinstalled them after clearing the registry hive just to be safe. i have lots of apps now, i dont wanna look for them again if i ever do a hard reset. i tried cleaning up the memory last night, and im still monitoring the phone if its still slow. i havent used it much today so i cant say it has improved, i'll get back and post what i see.

the thing is ....
get a 4 gigs or 2 gigs storage card and leave it in there .... install everything on it ... Piece of cake .. PS : you can switch between cards but the apps wont work till you put back the latter ! you can still use like 25 mb/s and the device works fine ..
how can we Increase the storage's space cuz i got like 109 mb/s for program and i don use THAT much .... i got only 42.95 mb/s as storage .. i miss that WM2003 se for that only cuz i can adjust the memory the way i want !

ok. I hav a 512mb sd card, im planning to buy one with laer capacity. I never realy remove the memory card.
now I tried freeing up the phone memory as u guys suggested, now I hav storage: 23mb and program: 59mb free:is that ok? or is it realy jst my phone? its stil slow even aftr I freed up some memory.
now my nxt plan is to dump my current rom onto a memory card and put them back after hard reset. wud that be ok?
update: ok, so i removed all installed apps, and did a hard reset to clean out just the registry hive. my BA is still slow. i dont know how this happened. it was just a month ago when i got this, it was perfectly ok, it was faster after i upgraded to wm6. this problem started just last week.

ameo running slow

as others, after installing lots of softwares on my ameo, it's running extremely slow nowadays.
I already reduce to keep those software I do require.
can anyone recommend any solution. thx.
I knew this is a general question and try to search in the forum. unfortunately it comes up lots of irrelevant result. :-(

If you're still on wm5, the first thing you should do to improve stability and speed is to upgrade to wm6. For me there was a world of difference.
If you have already upgraded and still find it slow, then one of the things you should rule out is whether or not it is caused by problem in reading and writing to the card or microdrive. Do a few rounds of performance test using Sktools a and are if they are normal still. If there are lost chains or cluster,repair them using pocket mechanics professional. Alternatively,copy the content to pc using wm5torage, reformat the card/drive,and copy them back from pc to card/drive. Redo the sktools performance test to ensure speed has improved. The last time when I had your problem ( soon after my wm6 upgrade), I did this and performance has been very good since then. Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the reasons I experienced sluggishness was due to incorrect formatting parameter for my card. When I format them correctly, speed improved dramatically.
If your MD is very fragmented,you could do what I recommended rather waiting hours and hours for defragmentation to finish.
I also try to install frequently used program in device memory,and seldom used one or very large program such as dictionary on microdrive. I have close about 50 third party software so the device memory isn't enough to hold them all. I find that speed also suffer of i'm low in device memory. So, don't waste it on things you seldom use.
Let's do that and see if speed improves.

thanks for your helpful tips. Eaglesteve. I will follow your hint to speed up my ameo. I am on WM6 arleady. probably as u point out, sw installed on MD is slowing down the device.
Forget to mention that, my device is always running at high cpu load. >90%.

Running at 90% could be a real clue. Have you installed any programs to improve your bluetooth performance?

whatabout device storage memory remaining? If it is critically low it will also prevent program from starting and making them slow. If so, check the size of internet temporary file in windows directory. If needed, go to delete them. I just did for mine and freed up over 50mb of device storage memory!

nrm said:
Running at 90% could be a real clue. Have you installed any programs to improve your bluetooth performance?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, I am using BTIO

Free memory s/w for HD

Hello,
Being used HD for one week, I found one problem about memory consumption (not a problem actually ).
At startup, about 120M free memory, after using for one day (Opera, view picture, games, stock manager, etc), only about 80M RAM left.
I have tried to use
- oxios memory
- MemMaid 2.0
but it can only free 1-2M RAM, where is my RAM

Yes, I found out the same problem! Try to do a reset and the memory is cleaned again. I use the X button to kill all programs after using them, but it seems to be fludding on a regular basis, also activesync program keep popping up when I'm not connected, and the memory usage slowely gets higher every hour with a few procent.
Does anyone else has the same prob? Didn't use special appz yet, because it doesn't seem to disturb working with device.
greetz,
swa

Swantony001 said:
Yes, I found out the same problem! Try to do a reset and the memory is cleaned again. I use the X button to kill all programs after using them, but it seems to be fludding on a regular basis, also activesync program keep popping up when I'm not connected, and the memory usage slowely gets higher every hour with a few procent.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Until the phone starts having problems, why worry? With every new device there are threads like this with people obsessing over the amount of free RAM their devices show, but honestly you can just leave Windows Mobile to deal with the RAM itself and you'll never have a problem. There's no need to try and recover all the RAM that you think should be free. The OS will take care of it.

I have the same problem. My guess is it a memory leak in some apps. ITs no big deal, because there is lots of free memory and if it really bugs me, I can do a soft reset every now and then.

Yes, it is not a problem to me until now as there are plenty of RAM available!
I just curious about the kinds of program that consume the memory??
From my observation, WM OS is not doing the job of memory management well.
SiliconS said:
Until the phone starts having problems, why worry? With every new device there are threads like this with people obsessing over the amount of free RAM their devices show, but honestly you can just leave Windows Mobile to deal with the RAM itself and you'll never have a problem. There's no need to try and recover all the RAM that you think should be free. The OS will take care of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Clearing your browser cache will retrieve some of it
(unless you have it to cache to the storage card)

I don't bother too much with this as it does not seem to become a problem.
But, I don't "load and leave" applications. I also generally do a soft reset once a week.
However, in SK Tools there is a "FreeUP RAM" application as part of the suite. I just ran it and it recovered 2 mbytes (a bit less than 1 %)

@ Swantony001 :
Hi, there is a thead about stopping Active-Sync activating itself all the time.
Works perfectly for me.
See here :
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=463013&highlight=active
Greetings,
go42

the memory leak does cause problems for me, well with tomtom7 it does. sometimes i get the message "not enough memory" unpon booting TT and am forced to do a soft reset.
its not often, but the fact it happens piddles me off!

Hi, guys!
I've noticed the same thing! Something consumes active memory!!!
I watched some processes... So "cprog.exe" and "device.exe" eat memory from time to time.
I use Soft Reset once a day or in two days.
If anyone gets a new WWE ROM with that bug being fixed, please, let me know .
Memory consumption is not a big problem now, but it's a bit annoying...

jonajuna said:
the memory leak does cause problems for me, well with tomtom7 it does. sometimes i get the message "not enough memory" unpon booting TT and am forced to do a soft reset.
its not often, but the fact it happens piddles me off!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Damn never experienced this problem before *touches wood*
Yeah i have experience the memory leaking up starting from 38% to 44% in a matter of hours.
No biggie, but if it comes down to problems like jonajuna experienced then, yes that is a problem.