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hi, I'd like to know if you can use the sd card and say partition it so that you can make your xda exec device use the storage on it as programe memory so it speeds the device up. this really is a fab device, but it really lacks the memory capacity that I had on a blue angel.
I have a 1gb sd card and don't mind loosing any storage space to accomplish this. if there isn't a way, can someone try and find a reg tweek for this....
anyway, I leave it with you...
cheers.
joey jojo
I think this is something which should be taken as a clue by developers who make programs such as Memaid, Pocket Mechanic, etc and include this as a a feature. Maybe the concept will be something similar to the Virtual Memory on a regular windows pc.
You are absolutely right, I too really miss the shortage of program memory. I can never open a really complicated web page with lots of images in Netfront before I get the dreadful warning that I have run out of program memory.
I hope some developer picks this up and incorporates this as a feature. I am sure this will increase his sales many many times.
Regards
you can put your internet explorer's cache on the sd-card...
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Cache]
change cache from '\windows\profiles\guest\temporari internet files' to '\SD_MMCard' to achieve this...
however you'll notice that it only slows your device incredibly down if your SD-Card is not set up right
see also http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=50301
There is just no way a third party program can add this. On the windows mobile team blog, there's a post from a few months back talking about doing virtual mem on the SD card, and basically, it's just not in the OS and won't be until at least WM6, and third-party programs can't do it.
JasperJanssen said:
There is just no way a third party program can add this. On the windows mobile team blog, there's a post from a few months back talking about doing virtual mem on the SD card, and basically, it's just not in the OS and won't be until at least WM6, and third-party programs can't do it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Those are very disappointing news...
Speaking of memory management and the OS itself..I really wonder during the development of WM5, did they try to come up with a better OS, or just building up upon WM2003.
Reason why I say this is my Universal crashed yesterday, and a look into the "Memory" panel in the Settings showed the OLD memory management screen along with the sliders and all... :lol:
Looks like the developers got lazy and just placed a panel on top of the old one :lol:
Ehh.. You guys want to be buying new SD cards every third month?
Flash memory like the SD cards have only a limited number of write operations before they fail.
Using them for storage is good, because you don't write to the cards that much.
Using them as memory would totally screw up the card in a rather short time.
And, I think using SD card for program memory would result in a slower application, because of the read/write speed of the SD compared to the RAM..
--- EDIT ---
3 months is just a figure of speach..
I have no idea of how much time it would take before failure occurs..
It would probably result in slower and slower performance, because some sectors would be worn out faster than others..
What you say about the writes before failure is right, but when you are faced with a £300 PDA that has the same amount of RAM as my little finger, you have to do something.
SD cards are cheap enough these days, and money grows on trees. I'd rather be able to leave programs open and not worry about how much it will slow the machine down to have more that three big apps running than I would be about coughing up for a new SD card every 3 months.
I have seen a 4GB card on Ebay for less than £80, Tescos sell 1GB for £30 these days.
The great thing about Tescos is their guarantee. You buy the card, write it to death, take it back for a full refund, no questions asked.
Does anyone know how I can get more program memory on my Wizard? I've come to the conclusion that the only way to get zippy program access on the WM5 device is to leave the programs running. Unfortunately I'm always running into "low on memory" conditions. With no software running I have 20 meg free program memory. With my regular suite of tools running I'm down to 4 megs making use of pocket IE limited. I looking for either a software or hardware solution.
Thank you
Richard
i second the question...
is there maybe a way to use the storage card for program memory?
Sadly, there is no easy way to increase the RAM available AND keep programs "zippy".
My personal solution is, set programs to close (with Pocket Plus or any other similar program) and overclock.
yeah, i am doing the same like romp, but if we can find a way to repartiion the memory of the device to make more available memory for the apps will be great
closing works but not the answer
I had the skey program set to close apps except the ones I specified but truthfully this isn'th the best answer. WM5 progs take to long to initially load so I like to leave them open to have the speedy appearance of a treo650. The list of programs I had set to minimize on close with skey was more than available memory would be able to handle.
I did check on a hardware solution and it appears that on WM5 devices we are out of luck. PPCtechs tried on a few treo 700W's with no luck memory size is hard coded into the OS.
Shame too since I'm almost a convert to this device for hacking reasons. For business use the Palm OS treo's kill WM5 devices and that's shamefull since OS updates have been almost nonexistent. Heck even palm os can use 4 gig cards with fat32.
Anyway different thread i've found enough third party software to make my wizard experience close to the treo's. I must say this though no matter what I have done this is not a one handed use device. it requires the pen too often.
Cheers
It took me a while to realize I'm confused, but it seems I'm confused about Hermes/WM5 memory allocation.
I've been using PocketPC's since PPC2000, there (and in PPC2002, PPC2003) the o/s resides in flash, and RAM is partitioned between storage and program memory. Thus, loading lots of applications to the device reduces the amount of program memory available for actually running programs. Those o/s had a slider to influence the balance of memory allocated.
Since I got my 8525 I've been assuming that it worked the same way, despite the loss of the memory slider. There have always been indications that I was wrong though - I never saw the memory balance shift, and nothing I've done seems to increase the program memory. Even removing several applications from Storage and installing them in Extended ROM didn't help. I'd LIKE to free up more program memory so apps like Mapopolis can use a LOT of it....
My Start->Settings->System->Memory page shows 56.22MB (Total) for Storage and 49.08MB (Total) for Program. When reading about the Samsung "stacked" (aka MCM) processor I realized that none of the variants listed had more than 64MB SDRAM, and 56.22+49.08 > 64!!!
It seems like either "Storage" now equals flash memory (vs volatile RAM in PPC2003 et al.) and/or there's more the 64MB of SDRAM in the Hermes or something. If all 64MB were available I'd expect more Program memory than 49MB....
I'm confused - Can someone explain or point me to an explanation of how the Hermes/WM5 allocates that SDRAM?
TIA,
Richard
Hermes has Samsung KD5657ACA-D090 chip provides 128Mb NAND Flash + 64Mb Mobile SDRAM. See here:
http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Hermes_HardwareOverview
pof said:
Hermes has Samsung KD5657ACA-D090 chip provides 128Mb NAND Flash + 64Mb Mobile SDRAM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks pof! That's the one I thought it was - but I'm even more confused about the allocation of the 64MB now. If all of it goes to Program, how come I only get 49MB? If it gets split, how come Storage + Program is more than 64MB?
Ugh, I'm confused
Richard
rsolomon said:
Thanks pof! That's the one I thought it was - but I'm even more confused about the allocation of the 64MB now. If all of it goes to Program, how come I only get 49MB? If it gets split, how come Storage + Program is more than 64MB?
Ugh, I'm confused
Richard
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
These sometimes confuses people...
But, the stated "Storage: 56.96" is the 128MB part, in that resides the whole OS, ExtROM etc. So in the end there is only 56.96 available for the system to use, plus the other installed programs that cuts it down to about 30MB free after a clean boot (that's just the way it is thanks to our lovely microsoft programmers <3)
The thing is that when you boot your device, the machine loads the whole OS to the running program memory and allocates some of it to important system files, that's why there is 48.80 total and then there is the rest running programs that take space, and about 30MB is free after clean boot on my device.
That's the way it has been programmed, mobile device programming is alot frustrating than on desktop PCs, so the memory handling is very important.
And don't mix those two when you said "56.22+49.08 > 64!!!", they are two separate memoryes. (56.xx being the 128 part and 49.xx being the 64 part).
Don't ask why microsoft excluded the memory allocation slider, maybe the older devices and OSs were differently programmed (memory handling).
gvoima said:
But, the stated "Storage: 56.96" is the 128MB part, in that resides the whole OS, ExtROM etc. So in the end there is only 56.96 available for the system to use, plus the other installed programs that cuts it down to about 30MB free after a clean boot (that's just the way it is thanks to our lovely microsoft programmers <3)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That much is logical - not all 128MB of the flash is allocated to the file system mounted as "Storage" - clearly some is for Bootloader, Radio, etc.
Are you really saying the OS and user-writable storage share a filesystem? That seems counter-intuitive to me, though presumably there are user-inaccessible flags to prevent over-writing system files. In PPC2003 there was a ROM file system and a RAM filesystem overlaid so they appeared together. You seem to be saying that in WM5 the user filesystem lives in a portion of the flash - unlike a portion of RAM as it did in PPC2000-2003.
gvoima said:
The thing is that when you boot your device, the machine loads the whole OS to the running program memory and allocates some of it to important system files, that's why there is 48.80 total
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So you're saying WM5 hides ~16MB worth of RAM usage? Did PPC2003 execute O/S files in place then? I mean I can see that the o/s and running programs would take up space, but it's unclear to me why WM5 would report total memory lower than 64MB in that case.
TIA,
Richard
See also this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=278903
Got it
pof said:
See also this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=278903
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok, that's got it - the MSDN blog links (that Lurker0 linked http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=1027392) at least squared me away. Lemme see if I can summarize my own questions:
0) Prior to WM5 most of the OS *was* eXecute In Place (XIP) - certainly on the devices I owned. Now most devices do not support XIP for most of the O/S so more RAM is used in general to compensate.
1) Prior to WM5, PocketPC "Storage" *was* in RAM (for user data), with WM5 it's ALL in flash. Thus there's no sense installing to ExtendedROM vs Storage, because you still can't free up any RAM
2) WM5 *does* hide ~15MB of RAM usage - because they want to. So "Program" really is RAM and it's just stupid that reported Total doesn't match physical Total.
I was tainted by my previous PPC exposure I guess. Half the RAM means that Mapopolis for instance will then always be slower on my WM5 device than on my PPC2003 device - half the SDRAM clock speed doesn't help here either (iPAQ 5555 vs Hermes)
Thanks all!
Richard
1. There are still reasons to use Extended ROM instead of the Storage. The Storage is required for many tasks by the OS, it is wise to keep at least some megs of it free. But, as you can read around, not everything is recomennded for installing on a flash card. Here the External ROM can be in help, adding the storage that is always accessible by OS, and is not used by other means.
2. You may call it "hide" but WM5 actually uses it. Well, the way it uses such an amount of RAM makes it hidden from the tools that calculate total available RAM. But that paging pool is a wise solution. For instance, Symbian OS 9.1 phones (S60 3rd edition, UIQ3.0) use RAM uniformly, and, as such, the same 64MB is just not enough for all (OS, built-in apps, user installed apps). WM5, employing the virtual memory, uses RAM a smarter way.
Lurker0 said:
2. You may call it "hide" but WM5 actually uses it. Well, the way it uses such an amount of RAM makes it hidden from the tools that calculate total available RAM. But that paging pool is a wise solution. For instance, Symbian OS 9.1 phones (S60 3rd edition, UIQ3.0) use RAM uniformly, and, as such, the same 64MB is just not enough for all (OS, built-in apps, user installed apps). WM5, employing the virtual memory, uses RAM a smarter way.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed - by "hide" I simply meant not reporting it. I'd be fine with MS showing 64MB total with 14MB used - I just got thrown by showing 50MB "Total". I grok their rationale for that reporting choice, I just don't agree
As I alluded above, I have a specific target app which performed well on a PPC2003 system with 128MB of RAM and which is performing much slower on a WM5 system with 64MB RAM. Reducing the app's dataset (maps in this case) brings performance back in line, so I believe I have a memory issue. I'm running an older version of the app due to a bug which is still outstanding against the WM5-certified versions, so I'm likely not getting any help the app COULD be giving the OS. Bummer for me
On the plus side, I've learned a bunch about WM5 memory usage which I didn't know yesterday....
Thanks!
Richard
Hiya, please excuse my somewhat noobish question, but I'm just wondering, is it possible to use part of the storage memory or my microSD card as virtual memory? I'm running Schapps' WM6 ROM, and I want to start messing around with PocketDOS to play some old DOS games. However, I will need plenty of RAM both for the emulator and the games. As I only have about 25 megs free at boot, I'm just wondering if a swap file is possible?
Virtual memory
That's a brilliant idea, if it works it would be great.
We could increase performance too.
Let's hope one of the gurus out there has an idea, I don't see why it wouldn't work.
BUMP
*****bump*****
Hmmm, seems kinda strange that it's not available already. So it must not be possible otherwise there'd be a cab floating around already?
Hi everyone,
am quite new to these boards, and have only just got myself a secondhand xda IIs. In the last half a yer I have owned a HTC hermes, universal & kaiser but have finally settled on the BA because the design just suits me more. So far so good- am very happy!
I am a complete noob though and having just upgraded to WM6 from WM2003SE (following the WIKI guide & wizard) I am a bit puzzled about my phomnes' memory capacity and what goes where....
Reading over the forum I have heard how the reformating of exended rom (?) etc can increase your available storage to 128mb as part of the upgrade process. This I did with the unlocker and formatting tool. But upon upgradeing it seems I have only 64mb available for storage , but 100mb for 'programs'.... I am a bit confused. To make it worse when I load programs on the phone it actually reduces the storage capacity available rather than the 'program' memory- of which I have 75mb free that I can't seem to get at!! Can anyone please tell me what I am doing wrong or else point me in the direction of where I can educate myself about this? ....I know it is a very basic question, but am a complete novice to pdas since the last 6 months so please don't flame me!!
Thanks
Think of this in desktop computer terms.
Storage == hard drive
Program memory == RAM
explanation:
programs are installed to either storage or storage card. programs run using program memory.
hey tnx, i was looking for such info too tnx m8 for the help
Thanks! Crystal clear now!
one (or so) more quetion...
Hi- quick folow up question if anyone has the time to answer...
So I understand I have 64mb storage- but in WM2003 you could allocate how much to put to RAM & how much to put to storgae right? So therefore if I had lots of apps I wanted to load onto the phone and I needed more storage I could just reallocate. Was there not a way in the whole upgrade process to allocate less than 128mb to RAM so that I have more storage? I think I missed something here. If it is safe to have less than 128mb RAM i think I may go back and do the repartitioning thing again. Some advice would be much appreciated.
If so my question is why is it recommended to have 128mb RAM- would reducing it to less than that cause the phone to run too slow under WM6?? Is there a 'safe' guideline for minimum amount of RAM to allocate? Further clarification would be greatly appreciated! (As I see it I have lost some 'storgare' capacity this way, beecause programs excluded from the WM6 rom, eg powerpoint etc , be reloaded and so eat away at my new storage of 64mb)
I think you may have missed the point: storage is flash memory, program memory is RAM. The difference is that pre-WM5 flash memory held your vanilla system, Extended ROM, and the default (for hard reset). Everything else that you customised or installed went into RAM, which was therefore split between storage of programs and data and program memory. Remember how when your battery went flat your device lost everything? That's why, and why a backup battery was needed. WM5 and later devices do not need or have backup batteries.
Since WM5 all programs and user data are stored in flash: this can make performance slower but ensures that you survive a power failure unscathed. There are ways to get round the performance issues, compressing files with UPX saves space AND time because reading a smaller file from flash is obviously quicker, and expanding it in RAM goes very fast indeed. However I would not want to overstate the performance hit that you experience working from flash.
So this is why you have lost the ability to manage the memory split - it's nothing to worry about and indeed I am very pleased because my BA now has more program memory than my Hermes.
Hope this helps!
jbn
ssjw1000 said:
Hi- quick folow up question if anyone has the time to answer...
So I understand I have 64mb storage- but in WM2003 you could allocate how much to put to RAM & how much to put to storgae right? So therefore if I had lots of apps I wanted to load onto the phone and I needed more storage I could just reallocate. Was there not a way in the whole upgrade process to allocate less than 128mb to RAM so that I have more storage? I think I missed something here. If it is safe to have less than 128mb RAM i think I may go back and do the repartitioning thing again. Some advice would be much appreciated.
If so my question is why is it recommended to have 128mb RAM- would reducing it to less than that cause the phone to run too slow under WM6?? Is there a 'safe' guideline for minimum amount of RAM to allocate? Further clarification would be greatly appreciated! (As I see it I have lost some 'storgare' capacity this way, beecause programs excluded from the WM6 rom, eg powerpoint etc , be reloaded and so eat away at my new storage of 64mb)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In addition to jbn's answer above you can also use a ROM that has a RAMDISK. This takes a portion of the RAM and creates a folder that you can use as a filesystem. Many people prefer these, I do not. I use my SD card and my onboard storage and have no problems with space. If you decide to go with a RAMDISK enabled ROM beware that you will loose anything you install to that section of the filesystem if your batter and backup batter go dead. Exactly the same behavior you had with WM2003 in your BA originally.