Monday, April 21, 2003
...Pocket PC...Loaded Up...Can't Move...So Slow...
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 12:00 PM
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.
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.
