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Fixing Alarm Problems in Windows Mobile Devices |
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I recently addressed the following topic on my Keener Living Blog and thought it would be good to share it with the broader audience here:
* Appointment reminders not working at all on some Windows Mobile Pocket PCs
* Appointment reminders not having an audible alarm on the T-Mobile Dash after a WM6 upgrade (the reminders vibrate but do not produce an audible alert)
The second problem has an easy fix, thanks to Karl of Ask The Admin . His article describes a way of directly modifying the Dash profile to regain the audible reminders, and a commenter in that thread provides a way to do with it a CAB file. I tried the CAB file solution, and it works!
If your alarms are not working at all, there is software that can help you. MemMaid and SKTools can easily fix the problem for you. Both are commercial products, but they are inexpensive. In fact, SKTools has a "lite version" for Smartphones that is free.
These products fix the alarm problem by cleaning out your Notification Que. If your alarms are not working, the chances are real good that you have (1) a lot of duplicate entries in the NQ, and/or (2) that the NQ is filled with "crap." An example of what I mean with the "crap" would be the problem I had with my Treo 700w: its NQ had about a hundred or so entries that resembled a Universally Unique Identifier, such as "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000." Microsoft registry entries (on Windows and on Windows Mobile) are full of these identifiers, but, generally, they do not belong in the NQ ... if you see any of them in your Notification Que, you are probably safe in assuming that they are contributing to your problem. Both MemMaid and SKTools will let you examine the que for this.
But, the nice thing about MemMaid and SKTools is that you generally don't even have to examine the Notification Que yourself. You just use one of their menu items that says "eliminate duplicate notifications." Then, reset your device and you should have working alarms. If not, then use these tools to examine the NQ to see if there are any of these UUID-type entries. If you find a lot of them there, you probably need to clean them out. You may want to call the tech support center for your device before doing so, though, just to ensure that you don't delete one that is really needed. (I deleted them all on my Treo 700w, and then it worked fine.)
A couple of additional tips for your consideration:
* Pocket PC owners should check into getting Tweaks2k2. It applies a registry tweak to ensure Windows Mobile gets to finish its Midnight notification-que duplicate-elimination routine. The normal registry setting gives this built-in utility 15 seconds to do its job, which is generally not enough if you have a lot of appointments (and especially if you have a lot of duplicates). Tweaks2k2 extends the time to 60 seconds. It also has a lot of other tweaks. Note: I do not think Smartphones have this problem, but I am not 100 percent sure.
* Whether you have a Smartphone or Pocket PC, you may want to consider limiting your past appointments to a few weeks of history. (This is the default sync setting.) The worst problems I had with missing reminders was when I insisted on syncing my full calendar, going back a few years with it. The utilities I have mentioned will work even if you sync a complete history, like I did, but you may be able to avoid problems completely by limiting the historical calendar entries to a couple of weeks or a month.
Submitted Date: Jul 09, 2007
Source: Pocket PC Magazine
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