Spring Cleaning My Windows Mobile Devices

As readers of my blog know, I have been a Windows Mobile user since the early days of Windows CE 1.0. As a result of that long history, I maintained a nervous habit on the platform until the release of Windows Mobile 5, that being playing whack-a-mole with my running applications. Due to an early Microsoft design decision, most Windows Mobile applications do not inherently have an exit application function. Microsoft's argument for this is to minimize the load time for applications as well as its faith in the Windows Mobile memory manager, which is supposed to be smart about when to shut down unused and/or memory constraining applications. Unfortunately, this memory manager never worked effectively enough for my power user demands and consequently, I would instinctively navigate to the Settings -> System -> Memory -> Running Programs tab and manually zap any unnecessary program (which typically meant all but the one I was working in) from the list. With the advent of WM5, the memory management was finally useful enough to allow managing memory. Still, I have an ongoing tendency to exit any program that offers that option in said application's menu.

In addition to memory, I have also been a heavy user of storage cards of all shapes and sizes. Regardless of its physical dimensions, the flash memory associated with these cards all work on the same principle and therefore can be managed the same way. The most important practice I keep with all my critical memory cards is to plug them into a USB card reader on my computer and perform a full backup of the card to my computer once a week. While I could certainly purchase a native Windows Mobile application that can perform such backups, I find the computer copy much faster over USB 2.0 card readers and more useful since no compression is applied. This makes finding files and navigating folders a breeze.

Lastly, I use a memory and storage gauge utility bundled with my favorite launch manager application, iLauncher, and place these on my main screen so I can see my memory and storage resources in the flick of an eye. And when all else fails, a warm reset often takes care of my most egregious resource consuming applications like big adventure games.