Database Users

Haunted Device?

Hello,
Up until recently my nice new XDA Exec has been great. However, since yesterday it seems to have grown a mind of it's own which has me worried.
It's fine, and then all of a sudden, it goes very strange. The backlight starts to get really bright, then really dim randomly by itself. Then, applications start going odd. For example, the wisbar skinned startbars background disappears, and bits and peices in applications start to stop showing up. This is then followed by the device forgetting what is trusted and what is not. Trying to launch any program or utility results in a '<x> is untrusted, would you like to run' box coming up, even if it's Word, file manager or the most basic settings panels. Pressing yes allows the application to run, but it's very odd.
The first time this happened, I got a message saying there was insufficient power to support 'SD' (sd card?) even though it was on external power and there was no SD card in the device???
A few minutes after, the device freezes, leaving nothing but a soft reset as an option. After doing so, it all goes back to normal and runs fine. I'm yet to find any cause to this and would appreciate any ideas, it seems quite odd to me. It happens when both on battery and external power, so I can rule that out.
Any ideas? This is a relatively new device, pretty clean ROM with a few applications and the TrueVGA modification - however, it ran fine with all of these for a week or so, so I'm at a loss.
Thanks for your time, I would appreciate any ideas or thoughts

Just do a hard reset, all the problems will probably go away.

The solution is obvious. You need to call someone. But who you gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS

GaZ said:
The solution is obvious. You need to call someone. But who you gonna call
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Damn - beat me to it

How often do you need to restart HD2

I use stock ROM at the moment with few added programs from trusted resources only (tomtom, coreplayer). I really like the phone. But around once a week it just stops responding, need to do reset. I am not heavy user of it, besides talking mostly use to read email, listen music, and check few web pages (no gaming, chating, etc). Spoke to some iPhone friends, they do not remember ever reseting device. I don't like iPhone for other reasons and really wanted this device to by iPhone killer It is in most cases, but not on stability, at least in my case.
Do you often need to reset the phone? Can something be done about it? I would agree to run some every night (sheduled) reset software if it exists. However it might be not possible, since during startup you need to enter PIN into phone...
How can I get my pride back?

do you close the applications after using them? please mind that by default, the x button only minimizes, leaving them open. to close, you must acces the task manager but it's much easier if you install a third party one. for example, with dutty's task manager you can set the x button to actually close the programs and also, you can very easily manage them.
besides this, i recommend you install cleanram which is a very good tool if you want to avoid resetting the phone.
you can disable the pin password in security settings.

I too use Tomtom and Coreplayer but I have only had to soft-reset once since I got the phone ages ago.
Mind you, I do switch the phone off and back on again every day before I synch with Outlook, so maybe that's why it's so stable!

thank you 27firesnake, will try to find dutty's task manager and cleanram to install. I do close programs from time to time, but not immediatelly. As you mentioned it is not that convenient.
Disabling PIN would allow to run some script to reset phone at some intervals. Most convenient would be to set it let's say to run at 4 a.m. on Saturday night, so it does not disturb you, but also limits the risk of not hearing alarm, if something goes wrong .... Wonder if that posibility to restart phone on shedule exists?
Jim, restarting phone every day certainly reduces potential error risk

i don't know if the phone has this feature already but there is a very nice app for this called g-profile. i installed it once and it worked fine on my hd2 but i don't really need it so i don't have it anymore. i recommend you try it, who knows it may become one of the essentials for you.

I have to restart my phone at least twice a week, back-cover off, battery out, and start it up again!

If I don't manually restart it each evening, sometimes the alarm doesn't go off in the morning and I might get the 'SMS stuck' problem during the following day ... so, by restarting it each evening the phone works more-or-less okay for me.
However, it's still sad that I need to do that on a 630 eur phone.

As I only got it a week ago and spend my time installing and removing stuff I'm resetting 10 times a day...
But once that early excitement phase is behind I hope it will be like my previous TyTN II, a reset every 1-2 weeks.
WM seems to have it's "humor" though. Sometimes it won't crash for 2 weeks, sometimes it will crash 5 times the same day. That's always doing the same things, of course.

kilrah said:
WM seems to have it's "humor" though. Sometimes it won't crash for 2 weeks, sometimes it will crash 5 times the same day. That's always doing the same things, of course.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats one of the funnier things I've heard about WM for awhile!
I have a spare battery in an external charger. When the juice is low I swap it for the freshly charged battery, thereby doing a soft reset anyway. On average my battery lasts 2 days. So I soft reset every 2 days.
Reasons I do this:
- Prolongs each battery by spreading out the number of cycle charges (I think its ~300 for LiIon batteries).
- Soft reset = fresh RAM to play with.
- By opening and closing the battery cover on a regular basis, I hope to loosen it (its so bloody tight!).

I used to have a application on my TP that had a lot of features including to soft reset the phone every night, and entering your pin code (which you had to insert in that program) i will look for it again when im home i hope i still have it. it also had some really usefull features like turn the sound of during the night!

CAB request!

Can somebody with the know how make a little program which litterally only performs one task: kills the process services.exe.
The reason for this is it is the cause of many soft resets in a day. Sometimes not even fixing the slowdown anyway and causing the famous black screen of death.
But as soon as i go to sktools and use the processes tool and kill the process phone goes back to being how it should! However because the phone goes into major slowdown it takes ages for the sktools processes program to load and then hard to select services from the list because of the lagging etc so it would be nice just to have a link that i could put on my quick links and when phone goes to melt down just press this magic button which saves the phone being hurled at a wall!
It needs to be called Meltdown Override or something!
This is a serious request as it would make HD2 use a much more pleasant experience!
Many thanks

This is pretty easy to do AFAIK...
If nobody else does it, I can do it when I have some more free time ...

I would appreciate this so much!
I think I may even use AEB to assign it to a long press of the back key or something

But, does services.exe auto-starts again? Because you could have some problems if you kill it and don't start it again...

Yer it does straight away but not running at 90% + CPU.

I find it unlikely that services.exe is really the culprit here, but rather a service installed on your phone that is misbehaving. If you find out which service is causing the problem, and then uninstall or disable it....
curing the disease, rather than treating the symptoms.

X1-owner said:
I find it unlikely that services.exe is really the culprit here, but rather a service installed on your phone that is misbehaving. If you find out which service is causing the problem, and then uninstall or disable it....
curing the disease, rather than treating the symptoms.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This guy is right...

Ive only just installed a new ROM voda UK 1.72 so I have next to no programs installed at the moment so I don't see what could cause it.
The main time this happens is when left charging over night and when you go to use it in the morning it's completely screwed. Soft reset doesnt fix it it just goes to black screen of death so then u have to take the battery cover off and reset again. The only thing i have found to get it to a useable state again is to kill process services.exe, and then its fine again. Once by doing that it stopped weather update and text messaging from working but atleast when i then did a soft reset things where still fine and those two things worked again and no laggy phone.
I kno it seems stupid to just kill a process and not find the problem but i cant see what the problem could be considering how recently i hard reset the phone (which i did 3 times in total to see if it got rid of the problem).

Just forget that ROM and go back to a working one? Seems easy to me... don't always need to have the latest or highest version number, just something that works... If 1.72 doesn't work for you, don't use it!

I would if it wasn't for the fact that after doing the annoying procedure in the morning of killing process "services.exe" then soft reseting, it runs the quickest i have ever been able to use the device on any ROM before it

You know that services.exe is one of the main parts of your phone-funcionality (calls, sms, etc.)?
As you said you experience it in most cases in the morning... Have u got GAlarm installed?
If yes --> Did you check the RegKey MidnightWakeup=True and change it to false?
My Girlfriends TD2 had the same issue. CPU usage by services.exe was often around 70-90% until i applied this change...

Services.exe is just like svchost on a windows-machine, it just hosts a bunch of services. So most likely its a service that has gone crazy.

Soft reset X10?

Does anyone know how to perform a soft reset on the X10 without losing any data and not having to take out the battery? Thanks in advance.

What exactly are you trying to do? I'm not sure I follow. Is it something that just turning the phone off then on again would solve? To me that would be a "soft reset".

I did soft resset, but you will loose data. You dont need to open the battery though. Sync you contacts with google and save your txt and other docs at your SD then soft reset.

not sure if you can soft reset this phone. it has a factory reset but you will lose your data, all data on the phone.
i sync through sony ericsson and just synced again to get my contacts back.

These reset phrases are used rather incorrectly and confusing I've noticed. To my understanding, these are what they mean:
Soft Reset: Restarting from a function within the operating system, ie. clicking on a Reset icon or using the power button to invoke the shutdown command.
Hard Reset: Forcefully restarting the phone by removing the battery, putting in back in, and switching the phone on again. eg. the phone froze and can't Soft Reset it.
Factory Reset: Just what it says, resetting the phone, losing all data to revert back to factory conditions. Don't even need to take the battery out then in again.
So I don't get what the OP is trying to do.... unless OP wants to Factory Reset it without losing data? Which is not possible. And what's with removing the battery? What does that do you good?

From what I understand, Hard Reset IS a factory reset. Soft reset is when you restart within the OS. Turning it off and turning it back on is basically soft reset.

ShadowFlare said:
So I don't get what the OP is trying to do.... unless OP wants to Factory Reset it without losing data? Which is not possible. And what's with removing the battery? What does that do you good?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Figured I'd insert the necessary icons in the appropriate places.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sorry guys, I am coming from a Windows Mobile phone and I had to soft reset the phone few times a day to make it run faster. I was thinking if the X10 gets sluggish, I need to do the same but it doesn't sound like I do?

When you said without losing data and taking the battery out kinda confused us as to why would you lose data or needing to take the battery out just to Soft Reset it.
I was an X1 user, so Windows Mobile... so I know what you mean... needing to restart the phone when it's starting o slow down. So far my experience with X10, it's not like that. The longest I have been without restarting the X10 was 3.5 days, not because it's started to get sluggish, becuase it ran out of juice!
So far, I've never noticed any sluggishness if you don't restart the X10, bless the Android! Apart from the weird battery drain behaviour, I love my X10!

Immediately after restarting the phone, Task Manager says that the available memory is around 107 MB. (That is after killing all the unnecessary apps that are started at startup.)
After half a day, same apps running, I only have 77 MB.
After a couple of days without restart, I have seen numbers around 50 MB.
I haven't tested this thoroughly, but I feel that the phone responds faster after a restart. (Less lag in timescape, phonebook, etc.)
What is this memory leak, and does it seem right that a restart could improve performance?

There is no memory leak.
When you start an app, the app is loaded in memory.
When you exit the app with back button, the app will be kept in memory but in a suspended state (not using the CPU).
Of course, your RAM goes down but this is not a problem because Android is such a smart boy and will keep track of which apps are used often wnd which aren't so, when a new app will need RAM the less used is "unloaded" to make space for the new one.
Using task killers to kill apps and make RAM is bad.
Why?
1. Free memory is wasted memory
2. Starting an app every time is used will just drain more battery.
3. If is already in memory it will just change the state from suspended to running and will be there, running, in a second instead in 3 seconds or what ever is the load time for that app.
It makes you feel better when you see 200Mb free?
Use a task killer, set it to kill all the apps when the screen goes blank and after complain about the phone being laggy and the battery draining too fast.

It's not a memory leak.. it's the way the OS manages the memory.. it will leave stuff in memory in case you need to use it again, therefore being quicker.. using task killers, for example will actually slow the phone down a little, because it will have to load apps back into memory when you want to re-use them.. if it runs out of RAM then it will clear something from memory that isn't being used..
@TUX - Hahaha.. didn't see your reply til i'd typed mine out!!... SNAP!

Thanks for your replies. But I'm not sure I understand completely...
I sometimes kill apps that I won't be using for a long time. I check my e-mails in the morning, then I won't be using wifi for 12 hours, so I don't need the e-mail and browser apps during that period = I kill them. Is that unnecessary? Don't they use any of the battery at all? My first concern is battery capacity.
Also, my (poor?) understanding was that the phone uses some of the free memory when it starts new processes (for example, loading a contact's page). My second concern is to have timescape, contact management, etc running more smoothly.
At the moment, I only have ~30 MB available memory. My phone now uses ~3 seconds to start new apps. (No, not the ones I closed earlier today. ) 6 seconds for timescape (which was already running). Is that because it takes time to free up memory in order to run the new stuff?
When I shut down most of the apps (~100 MB free memory), it only takes 1-2 seconds to start new apps, including timescape (which was still running - not killed).
BTW, there seems to be a limit around 30 MB - even though I keep starting new apps, it does not drop below 30.
Final q... Does the phone store other stuff than apps in the memory? Perhaps hidden system processes? Running exactly the same list of apps (looking at task manager), I get very different amounts of free memory.

ShadowFlare said:
These reset phrases are used rather incorrectly and confusing I've noticed. To my understanding, these are what they mean:
Soft Reset: Restarting from a function within the operating system, ie. clicking on a Reset icon or using the power button to invoke the shutdown command.
Hard Reset: Forcefully restarting the phone by removing the battery, putting in back in, and switching the phone on again. eg. the phone froze and can't Soft Reset it.
Factory Reset: Just what it says, resetting the phone, losing all data to revert back to factory conditions. Don't even need to take the battery out then in again.
So I don't get what the OP is trying to do.... unless OP wants to Factory Reset it without losing data? Which is not possible. And what's with removing the battery? What does that do you good?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Firstly: http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/support/phones/detailed/toperformasoftreset?cc=ie&cws4=true&lc=en
vince2398 said:
Does anyone know how to perform a soft reset on the X10 without losing any data and not having to take out the battery? Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Secondly: http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/sup...ormasoftreset/xperiax10?cc=ie&cws4=true&lc=en

HD2 extremly slow.........

Damn...again I have the problem that my HD2 is extremly slow......so slow that I'm not able to switch to the home tab anymore, the whole sense is not working. I only have the chance to press the windows button to open the programs menu which works fine, so I thought I should see something in the task manager which causes a lot of CPU usage, but there is nothing special to see, at processes there is no task which uses more than 5%, so why is it still slow? I already removed the battery several times, but it doesn't help, I can start the phone, then I can use the home tab and sense, but after like 30 seconds, its slow again.......
What else can I check?

I think it's some update; is the data connection established when it starts to get slow? (Could be some ActiveSync task which should not run)

Try to deactivate sense and check, if your hd2 is also slowing down.
When everything ist fine after disabling it seems so, that your manila is messed up =)
-> Hardreset

How can I disable sense? And why is it messed up? I mean I haven't changed anything during the last weeks and also I'm a little bit to lazy for hard resetting my phone every 1-2 month because everytime something happens which causes an extreme slow down......Also I hate to reinstall all that stuff again

remove SD card and check again!

definitely sounds like a sense issue.....
are you sure its not the"twitter bug" thats going around just now....
try logging out of twitter and see if you still get the freezes...

TheSKYY said:
How can I disable sense? And why is it messed up? I mean I haven't changed anything during the last weeks and also I'm a little bit to lazy for hard resetting my phone every 1-2 month because everytime something happens which causes an extreme slow down......Also I hate to reinstall all that stuff again
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
go to settings->today->items: uncheck htc sense
i didnt said that it have to be messed up, was only a guess.
but when everything works fine after disabling it should be a manila/sense problem.
You could also have a look at your taksmanager if there are processes with high cpu/ram usage.