04-21-2003, 08:00 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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...Pocket PC...Loaded Up...Can't Move...So Slow...
I have a client who has an Axim, and I help him with it now and then. Recently he began complaining that his Axim was running very slowly, and it was giving him out of memory error messages. I smugly assumed that he had simply loaded too many programs onto it, and that I could undelete the apps. I was shocked when I saw that he only had 0.5 MB of RAM total free on his 32 MB RAM device, and that was split between program storage and memory - the blue memory lines were so narrow I could barely see them. He couldn't even use his Bluetooth card without memory errors! I went into Remove Programs expecting to see 30+ apps installed, and instead I saw only four, one of them being the Adobe Acrobat reader. I needed to do some more sleuthing.
I loaded up Where Is My RAM and went to town. I was shocked at what I found! He's a very heavy user of GPRS for email & Web access, and it was very apparent how inadequate the Pocket PC is when it comes to dealing with junk that builds up. Check out what I found:
� 5 MB of temporary Internet files: Yes, Pocket Internet Explorer has a "Delete Files" button, but why doesn't it have a way to restrict the amount of storage used? Unless I'm mistaken, it would simply continue to grow and grow - does this seem like a good idea to you? Why not have a user-adjustable limit, or purge it on a soft reset?
� 3.5 MB of orphaned email messages: I looked in the /windows/messaging folder and found two huge email that totalled 3.5 MB each. The frustrating part is that I manually went through all his email folders, and he had five messages total, none with attachments over 10 KB. So why doesn't Pocket Inbox do a comparison of the email it has inside the app, and the email listed in that folder, and delete the ones that don't belong? Programatically, this doesn't seem too difficult to do. I find it really hard to believe that no one at Microsoft noticed this considering how heavily email is used there.
� 6 MB of temp files: The blame for this falls squarely onto the shoulders of Adobe. Not only is the Adobe Acrobat Reader slow to load and use, but it apparently doesn't clean up after itself very well. In the Temp folder I found several huge Acrobat temp files (6 MB in total) that weren't deleted even after I opened and closed the application again. Still, the burden here also falls on the Pocket PC OS. Why can't it recognize a low memory condition like Windows XP does and trigger a "clean up" application that would purge the directories I mentioned here?
:soapbox:
All in all, it was an ugly process going through those obscure directories deleting files, and certainly not something I could ever expect a normal end-user to go through. It's completely unacceptable that on a 32 MB device, there was 14.5 MB of wasted space - the operating system should not let that happen.
I know there are third-party tools to clean up these temp files, but this is a core element that should be handled by the operating system. I spent an hour surfing sites on my Axim and have 3.1 MB of data clogging up my temporary internet files, and even though with slow GPRS you want some caching, I'd much prefer to set it at 1 MB and forget about.
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04-21-2003, 08:09 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 321
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When I first went mobile with my iPAQ i quickly noticed the same issue with the temporary internet files. My solotion was to use OP reg tool and move the temporary internet file storage onto a card. It works very well.
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04-21-2003, 08:39 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 209
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by dcharles18
When I first went mobile with my iPAQ i quickly noticed the same issue with the temporary internet files. My solotion was to use OP reg tool and move the temporary internet file storage onto a card. It works very well.
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This is good. Someone (Jason, one of our contributors) recently wrote an article about clearing temp files. this helps as well.
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And there you are.
I was just thinking, "What could take this headache I have over that edge to a full blown migrane?"
And there you are.
- Dr. Cox, Scrubs
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04-21-2003, 08:43 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 437
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Can anyone with the original Pocket PC OS confirm that the IE Options PowerToy allowed the user to customize the cache size?
I think I remember being able to do so but I'm not sure.
I do agree with you Jason. When you have gigs and gigs of storage space, then 50MB worth of temp files don't matter much, but with the limited memory on our Pocket PCs, memory management and maintenance should be a big concern.
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04-21-2003, 08:54 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 34
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This doesn't exist yet?
It seems really odd to me that there is no utility out there to take care of this soft of thing. This is the sort of thing you could do even in eVB! I can accept that MS might have missed that in the OS, but surely someone else has observed this problem and crufted together a solution?
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04-21-2003, 08:56 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 18
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by R K
Can anyone with the original Pocket PC OS confirm that the IE Options PowerToy allowed the user to customize the cache size?
I think I remember being able to do so but I'm not sure.
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Yes, with the IE PowerToys, you can clear the cache and set it to a custom size.
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04-21-2003, 08:57 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 39
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I had a couple of e books that someone scanned in that required the ADOBE reader. I could only flip thru 20-30 pages before my memory got full. I'd have to close out the program - then open it again to continue reading the book.
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04-21-2003, 08:58 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 9
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This slow phenomenon occasionally occurs with my Ipaq 54x by the end of the day using a 3 meg medical database. I don't have any temps, email or surf the web. I just assume it is the way the OS mis-manages the memory. A soft reset always eliminates the extreme slowness.
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04-21-2003, 09:08 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Apr 2003
Posts: 10
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Not trying to advertise but...
I hope you don't all flame me, but this is the sort of reason why I created PowerStart. I hated having to use a 3rd party tool or Control Panel->Memory->Running Apps to manually close all apps. I hated having to go through File Explorer and delete temp files so I created a tool to automatically do it for me each time I turn my PPC on (as well as a few other things like having a startup sound). Here's the link to the press release:
http://www.handango.com/NewsArticle....0&platformId=2
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04-21-2003, 09:10 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 399
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Re: ...Pocket PC...Loaded Up...Can't Move...So Slow...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
� 5 MB of temporary Internet files: Yes, Pocket Internet Explorer has a "Delete Files" button, but why doesn't it have a way to restrict the amount of storage used? Unless I'm mistaken, it would simply continue to grow and grow - does this seem like a good idea to you? Why not have a user-adjustable limit, or purge it on a soft reset?
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there is a limit set but it's extremely high for a device that only came with 32 megs. tweaks2k2 has a tweak to make it user defined but there's one problem... you have to set it each time you reboot the device. According to the tweaks2k2 help, this setting defaults back to spec each reboot and the user has to reset it each time....
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