Uh oh, this time Windoze won. I am the type of guy, who never reinstalls OS, i had a 98SE running config for years, while all my friends were reinstalling every month. I am always trying to find a fine software solution, quick registry hack or something and in my career there was really no situation (except for hdd failure) when i really had to reinstall. Unless i met Windows Mobile 5. WM5 has a relatively nice app for managing standard alarms. I could imagine a better one as with almost all components of WM5 besides simple PIN password login (and even that could use better keys), but the alarm app looked promising.
On my vacation trip to Krakow this week i forgot to turn off the alarm I use to get up to get to work. P3600 has started a buzz sound and got me out from a serious hangover and, what was even better - there wasn’t any “Dismiss” button. After 2minute fight with it while I was still 50% asleep i decided to turn the device off.
The other day (two hours later), I restarted the device and everything was smooth unless the iGo software locked up and I had to restart the device. Since then the Alarm/Notification LED was blinking in amber, the Alarm was buzzing and vibrating just from the begging of boot with no way to turn it off. I’ve tried to set a new set of alarms, delete alarm reg. keys. Nothing helped. Here’s the summary of the most annoying PDA problem of the year:
- PDA’s amber led blinking
- No way to dismiss alarm
- Alarm buzzing/vibrating since boot (starts on green PocketPC splash screen)
- Alarm gets slower and less frequent on absolutely random basis
- Alarm slows down PocketPC device after few hours so you have to Soft Reset
- Soft reset does not help of course =)
- Appointments didn’t appear (probably because the overload on the event queue)
The annoying buzzing sound really drives you crazy while trying to debugging this error. I went through lot of discussions ending up with suggestions of Hard Reset (even from guys like me, who does not like this technique.) Some sources said to remove battery for five minutes to reset the clock, but my clock were set correctly even after 15minutes so i abonded this path.
Dead end turned out to be use of Scary Bear’s Check Notifications. I somehow overused it and deleted probably more notifications than i should, rendered ActiveSync unusable.
On one discussion I found out, that this problem has something to do with event queue and suggestion to use SKTools. At this point i was unable to test it, because i was unable to get SKTools to device using ActiveSync (I could use the card reader, but my 4GB MiniSD is compatible only with Trinity). So if you have more luck than me try the SKTools. In View -> Maintenance -> Notifications Queue there should be an option to delete clock.exe notifications and after a soft reset you could be out from this mess.
I did not try it, but at least I have following advices:
- Do not use build in alarms (any replacement app suggestions?)
- Use a backup software like SPB Backup
- Do not use Scary Bear’s Check Notifications
- Try to use SKTools, maybe it will help.
The good thing: Now after a HR I have a bigger motivation to load up a WM6 ROM. =)