Posts Tagged Tips

Managing Memory on your Smartphone

May 21

Permit me to get a bit nostalgic first. There used to be a time, when Nokia 3310s ruled the roost. When mobile phones were exactly what they claimed to be i.e. a portable phone, with some texting facilities. And then somebody introduced the colour screen. And then a camera. A QWERTY keyboard appeared on the market for those upmarket businessmen. Soon, one thing led to another, and phone’s became much more than just mere phones.

So, now, we’ve got Symbian phones, running the S60 platform. Although a widely used platform, it’s still a bit kludgey, and could definitely do with some performance optimisation. But one of the big plus points for S60 is the number of applications available for it. So, if you’ve got a phone with a powerful enough processor and enough RAM, it can be like a small handheld computer, mainly because of S60′s native support for multi-tasking.

Now, thing is, I’ve noticed that over time, when you install stuff, and uninstall stuff, and surf the web, the phone memory tends to get a bit cluttered. Now, this is a problem for most people, even for me, with my 5230 with 88MB of internal memory. Only 59MB is actually available from the time you switch on the phone. Which can be a pain to manage sometimes.

Thankfully, there’s a fairly simple solution. Firstly, move all of your non-essential files to the memory card. This includes videos, photos and music. Also, open your inbox and delete any messages with attachments, such as MP3 songs you might have received over Bluetooth. Even after you save them to your memory card, the files will remain in your inbox and eat up the memory.

Next, open the phone’s menu, and navigate to File Manager. For S60v5 phones like the 5800XM and 5230, the path is Applications > Office > File Manager. Once here, click on Backup, which should be in the Options menu. This will create a backup of all your phone memory data on your memory card.

Now, reset your phone, by going to the keypad when in standby mode, and typing *#7370#. This will hard reset your phone and erase all data from your phone memory. Your memory card will remain untouched, but if it was password protected a while ago, you’ll need to remember that password to be able to use the memory card after formatting your phone.

Once you’re done resetting. Simply head over to the same place where you backed up, but this time, select Restore. You should select all the options, except Files, since you’ve already taken care of the files in the phone memory, by moving them to the memory card.

After this, you’ll find that somewhere around 50MB should be left. Now, proceed to reinstall your applications, but make sure you install them to the memory card, and not to the phone memory.

Apart from this, even formatting your memory card isn’t such a bad idea. Just make sure you’ve copied everything you need to your PC first, and only then proceed to format the card. Then, you can selectively copy stuff back.

Tags: 5230, Hardware, Mobile, Nokia, S60, Tips

Flush

Aug 19

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 1 Comment

WARNING! : Keep barf bag handy.

Consider this analogy : Your PC is basically a commode. (For those with white coloured cases, this is more true than for others…I don’t know anyone with a ceramic PC case, so I can’t say anything about that…) Anyway, software is like crap. Constantly coming and going. Some like Firefox are like stains which will never go away. Thing is, other software leave stains too. And all this accumulates over a period of time, to make your PC an unsightly mess (much like your keyboard should be like, after you vomit over it, unless you were sensible and kept an air-sickness bag next to your PC like I told you to)

Anyway, I had messed around with Windows 7 for long enough…was getting a bit bored of it…and I knew that unless I got a pirated copy of it by March 2010, I would have to give it up. I also realised that my hardware can’t really cope up with it that well. For example, just a few simple benchmarks, such as Firefox start-up times, video conversion times and average FPSs on a few games is enough to tell me that XP is better suited for my PC.

I also realised that my old XP partition, which is around 3.5 years old was getting kinda like the aforementioned crapper. It needed a bit of freshening up. Thankfully I had the original XP CD with me (I did buy the original thing). So I decided to format the whole thing and start over fresh.

First I did back up entire C: partition. I had recently downloaded Acronis Disk Director, which is an amazing partition management tool. I had enough unpartitioned space left over for backing up the entire partition. After that, I also backed up the Application Data and desktop files from both mine and my brother’s account. I’d probably need that to keep some of my old settings.

After that, it as a simple matter of booting using the XP CD and formatting the partition. The entire setup process took around 30 minutes. But after that, installing all the necessary drivers and programs took another two hours or so.

After that, my PC was as good as new. Boot up was really snappy, as was shutdown, and in fact, everything in between. In fact, I tried out Burnout Paradise on this new PC, and it was working much better than on either 7 or the old XP. That’s when I realised how much good an occasional format and reinstall can do.

In fact, if I may be a bit pedantic, you’ll probably make up on the time lost out during the whole process by the simple fact that everything else is now happening much faster than before. The registry is much lighter, startup and services are working in optimal condition. All this and more contributes to a better PC experience.

I really think anyone who has the opportunity should do what I did, and be sure to share your experiences.

Tags: Software, Tips

(Lack of) reliability

Jun 15

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | No Comments

Ah yes…it’s business as usual…another day…another of Dick’s (my PC) parts bites the dust. I was actually pleased about what happened this time. It was something a bit out of the ordinary. Not the usual graphics card blowing up, or motherboard thinking it’s a pencil sort of stuff.

This time it was my monitor. Three and a half years old. LG 700E. CRT. 17″ non-flat. SXVGA (that’s a maximum resolution of 1280×1024). And now it’s gone.

It was funny. One morning, I switched on the monitor, the PC being already running all night, and I noticed something funny about the display. Flickering and wavy lines…the sort you see on long distance transmissions in sci-fi movies. I thought my 8600 was going to conk out again, so I took some emergency measures, the simples of which being switching off the PC for a while. It had been donloading for a while now, so I though a bit of cooling down would help. I had almost killed my motherboard last time by letting it run for too long.

Anyway, after I booted the PC again, the problem persisted, so I came to the logical consclusion that my monitor was acting up. I didn’t pay much attention to it, and continued with my work.

Later in the day, I started Burnout Paradise. My PC, being 3 years old, isn’t exactly all that great for the game, and I had set the resolution low, and just as Burnout changed resolution, I heard a faint ping, and then darkness. Quite undramatic actually.

If I switched off the monitor and restarted it, I would just hear the faint ping, instead of the sound of degaussing. I was pondering for quite a while, and called up Mom to ask if we could ask for a spare monitor or something. And that’s when she reminded my that we still had the old 15 inch monitor from my Compaq Presario. Agreed it’s white, which goes against the colour scheme of my entire PC (black with silver highlights). But it works. And it has been working for over 8 years. Agreed it’s just 15″ diagonally and supports a max resolution of 1024×768. but it works…

And this makes me think about quality. I clearly remember when I was about to buy my PC, that I wanted a Philips monitor, but they gave me a LG one anyway, and I didn’t quite mind at the time, but now I think that I should have raised hell. If only my monitor was like my LG refrigerator, which has been running flawlessly for over a decade.

But now I have a newfound respect for my old ‘heap of junk’. I think I’ll try to get the old PC fixed…needs a ROM flash or something…otherwise it’s completely fine…and quite ancient…but that’s OK.

Tags: Hardware, Tips

Windows Irritants : Low Disk Space

May 19

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 3 Comments

My hard disk is well, really a bit of a mess. I’ve got so many partitions, that free space is now really all over the space. One of the issue I have to deal with is partitions which are nearing fullness. I’ve got 3 such partitions : Scratch Drive (Z:), which is for my Windows swap file; Games, Vol. 1 (F:), and SCDA, which is just for one game. I’ll explain that in another post.

Anyway, the problem is that Windows 7 constantly bugs me about the amount of space left on these drives. Luckily, there’s a simple registry tweak for this.

Usual Disclaimer : Since I’m not behind your chair, with a gun at your head, you can’t hold me responsible for your actions. Do what you’re doing, at your own risk. You have been warned….muhahahaha…

Open the Registry Editor by typing in ‘regedit‘, in a Run dialogue (Ctrl+R). Now, in the tree, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Policies. Right-click on the right pane, and select New -> Key, and give the name as ‘Explorer’. Now, select the Explorer key in the left pane and in the right pane, right-click -> New -> DWORD (32bit) Value. Type in the name as ‘NoLowDiskSpaceChecks’. Then right-click on this new entry and select ‘Modify’. Change the value to 1.

Then you’re done. All you’ll need to do is restart ‘explorer.exe’. Do this by entering the Task Manager, going to the Processes tab, selecting explorer.exe, and pressing Delete. Confirm it, and all your windows will magically vanish…:-P…just open the Run dialogue and type in explorer.exe, and you won’t have any more annoying pop-ups and system tray icons.

Tags: Software, Tips, Windows

DIY : Escape from iTunes

May 17

Posted by The Nut in Tech | 3 Comments

Some people don’t really like iTunes, but are entrapped, mainly because they’ve got an iPod or perhaps their libraries are too integrated with iTunes. But it really isn’t all that hard to move to Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Real Player or one of the other alternatives.

First, try to get all your music in one place. This might be unneccesary if you’re like me, and have your entire collection in one folder (actually, in my case, partition). This helps when you’re adding the files to another media player. Do this by going to the Edit menu -> Preferences. Click on the Advanced Tab, and set the iTunes library location to the place you want all your music to go. Now, clik on File -> Library -> Consolidate Library. Will take some time, but will make sure that all the music in your iTunes library is now organised in one folder.

I’m trusting that you didn’t try and play video with iTunes. It is possibly the worst player for video. Apparently it refuses to take video codecs from the OS’s codec library, and will only support .mov (QuickTime) and .mp4 files. I can’t say about podcasts, mainly because I don’t really use them too much.

All you need to do is add that folder to your new media player’s media library and/or watch list. A watch list will monitor that folder for any changes, and automatically add new media to the library as and when you add it to that folder.Now, the main problem arises when you’re thinking of moving metadata. This can be a pain with iTunes, mainly because it doesn’t believe in keeping stuff like playlists, play counts and ratings as metadata with your music files, but it keeps it hidden away in that crappy iTunes library XML file. That place looks like a complete junkyard. And I can see why searches take so long in iTunes. Anyway, there’s a solution I stumbled across – MusicBridge.

Actually, this only works for iTunes -> Windows Media Player. It’s a tool which copies all that info from your iTunes Library to your WMP library. All I had to do was just add the media files into the WMP library, and then run this program which did the rest for me. I had an option to copy just General Metadata, Ratings, Playlists, Artwork and more such stuff. It could also copy stuff from WMP -> iTunes, but such a person would be a moron, right?

In it’s defense, iTunes does seem to use less RAM in Windows 7 for some reason. Apparently, window management’s gotten better, and this means that it needs less of private memory. But that’s about it…;-)

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Software, Tips