Palm T|X not so good :(

F

fireleo16

New member
Hi,

I've bough my T|X about two weeks ago and I pretty much like it, but I experiance some difficulties which make me quite unhappy.

I always liked Palm. I had Palm IIIxe, my wife now uses Tungsten T3. What I really liked about it, is the fact that it had rather stable software. Well T3 is not that stable, but in every day use you don't get annoyed.

With TX its different. Mainly the Blazer Web Browser. Maybe I have a faulty software release or something, but I don't feel like it is the case.

Here are the problems:
- every now and then, when i press a hardware button, while using blazer I get a soft reset. (3 resets an hour or some times even more often). Before reset, palm makes about 10, very fast click sounds (system click sounds)
- this website www.o2.pl - causes a soft reset
- last page viewed: that sucks (or I can't configure the browser corectly). Every time i enter the browser, it reloads the page - why cant it go offline? WebPro for T3 remebered the contents of the last page - that was very convinient. I know, I can save content, but when I want to make a fast application switch its useless.
- some time it taks ages to load the application, or process the request.
- when I press back, I have to navigate through the page once again
- when I try to login on that website : tlen.pl, the browser wants to download the index.php file to card.

Some apps can cause a soft reset too, but I know it might be caused by the change in the file system (older apps don't always support it) - however "backward compatibility" is not that bad after all. And another thing, the app can die, but why with the palm?

I used palm as an organiser. For that the IIIxe was more than enough. I wanted to read offline content - no problem I had plucker.

Now when I want to use WiFi and browse web pages I bought T|X, but the main app sucks. I'm even thinking of buying WebPro even though it is proxy based (in handheld mode).

Does anyone had similar expiriance or has any solutions to my problems?
Pleas give me feedback.

michal
 
When I migrated to the TX, I had lots of resets too. I tracked it down to Jot which had come over from my T2. Deleted that and resets went away.

I too have noticed that, once in awhile, Blazer seems to take 45 seconds to a minute to load. I have a white screen but nothing else. Not a clue about that.

I've never had a reset from a web page. My guess is that you have something that came over from the old Palm. Perhaps there's a hack you overlooked.

John
 
I tried the above website on my TX and it seems to work perfectly. My suggestion would be to do a hard reset then try Blazer withought putting any of your software back on the TX. This might tell you if it has something to do with other software or not.
 
Thats bad news for me :(. I did a hard reset this morning. I entered www.o2.pl - guess what, soft reset. I happens with both fast and normal browsing. Now I really don't know what to do.

Has anybody got any ideas?
 
Perhaps palm will put the reset button on the front of the device when they release the TX2, it would certainly make for easier reseting. I think the whole white screen followed by delay in reloading the browser are all 'normal' for the TX. It seems everyone is having the same issue. Blazer seems especially prone to any 'globally modifying' programs. Anything that might modify graffiti, power management like energy dimmer, or other system monitoring software. It's a matter of tracking down the culprits and turning them off or changing your browser.
 
I wrote to Palm support, lets what they have to say.

Still, even if it is some trashy code on the website, it would be nice if the browser was immune to it.

michal
 
I just now did reload the website www.o2.pl and it still works for me on my TX using Blazer, complete with images and launguage that I do not speek ;) . It occured to me though that one thing I am doing differently than you I guess, is that I am surfing the web with my TX using bluetooth and my Macintosh laptop modem. I don't have wifi at my house or anywhere near my home.

I use an app called The Missing Sync instead of the Palm HotSync Manager. It allows me to connect my TX to the internet using the laptop's modem. It is not an Offline type of situation like Plucker. The TX is on the internet 'live' with this setup. I think there is a way to do this with Windows also but I don't know the required application.

It may be a little belated, and I may forget to do so, But I might go to a nearby town tomorrow that has some wifi hotspots. If I can think to do so I will try to connect to your website via my TX's wifi.
 
My conclusions:

- Palm resets on the website: www.o2.pl - i think it is some problem with Blazer. But it must be more subtle then just the issue of an unhanled website. I think that the error lies in the layer of request/response handling. Some proxies/gateways might be altering these in such a way, that blazer can't handle them correctly on certain websites. This would explain why, when I use gprs i did not have the problem, and when i connect through my ISPs line I do have resets. Palm support tried hard to resolve the problem, but not yet happened.

2) when i try to login on the page tlen.pl, Blazer tries to download the file index.php - I think, that PalmOs registers handlers for every file type. If there is an application that handles a certain file type, then a file can be downloaded to the device, otherwise only to card. In my case that would indicate, that there is a program that registered itself as a php file handler. However Blazer is not this program an to say more, there is no "forwarding of handling" from Blazer to that program. After a hard reset, the problem ceased to be. My guess is that my experiments with WebPro (beamed from my wifes T3) caused the issue.

- Long loading applications, especially Blazer - I read some stuff on 1src forums, and installed the memunfragment.tx from palm palmpowerups.com and the dbcachetool.
In short, the NVFS file system uses something called a dbcache, to speedup the read/write ops. This is because the non volatile memory, used for storage is much slower then ram. Apps and data are stored in the non volatile memory, but are run in ram. To speed up the access to data it is loaded to the cache. If the cache gets full, the unused data (i guess LRU?) is flushed back to the nonvolatile memory and after that new data is loaded. This operation causes apps to start longer. Most frequently it occurs with blazer because it seems to be the most resource consuming app. Dbcache tool can give one some control over cache flushing, but from what I read it was of more use with LDs and T5, which had problems with handling 'cache full' condition. Personally i used it only to monitor the amount of free cache during the tests (i had a feeling that it caused some random freezes to my palm, when it was managing the cache).
I also had one other problem, some times, when exiting an app i had a soft reset, again most of the times the app was called blazer. From what i read this was caused by memory fragmentation. The memunfragment works well, although it slows down the palm a bit, especially after a reset. But the latter is not a problem since I know rarely get soft resets at all.

Need to soft reset to wake up the Palm. I read a thread on that on several forums, I encountered that problem my self. Some blame third party apps/config files that deal with the same databases as the built in datebook and world clock. I don't use any such apps so I cannot verify it. However from what I noticed most of these people use alsa the security features of the Palm ie. auto locking. My investigations point to the security panel as a potential culprit. I updated the panel and used auto lock. I also experienced the need of soft reset to wake up my palm. I stopped using auto lock and no more problems.

Random resets when accessing command bar - do not use slovoed in the background mode, don't use resco lock for locking mcphling and lock PiLoc (localization package). - now I don't have these problems.

Grafiiti or digitizer - it is rather inaccurate, and from what I read it is a quite common problem. Unit exchange doesn't seem to help. In ma case, some time s line is treated as to lines or two dots. Some times i need to apply a fair amount of pressure to get the letter correct. But some argue that this might be solvable by a software hack. (there is one provided with a skining package by Alex Pruss, and a separate solution is supposed to be coming soon). The other problem, unsolved even by third party calibration tools) is the inaccuracy in recognizing where the tip of the stylus hit the screen. Imagine you tap copy, and the app receives a tap on delete :(. But if one is careful it is livable, I mean I learned to live with it and it is not really that annoying.

On of problem - this is a strange one. Some times one has the feeling that the hardware buttons don't work when the unit is off. After two up to even four tries Palm finally gets it. It is not a problem with the buttons though. They work perfectly fine. I think it is some software/hardware event handling issue. It occurs only when Palm is completely of. If I have PocketTunes running the buttons work flawlessly. My guess is, that there is some hardware polling for a button press event and you need to get in sync with it to turn on the unit. One can consider this a feature, a key lock.

I must say, that now I am pretty happy with my Palm:
- i have polish fonts, with no problems: PiLoc (although support for UTF8 would be a nice thing)
- blazer works fine, no more resets (i avoid o2.pl)
- it has good multimedia capabilities
- the pim package is very good
- if i want to save money on GPRS i use Opera MINI
- I have a good ssh client - pssh
- I can read articles offline: Plucker (good integration with firefox)


I hope it helps somebody :).
 
velocipedist, I found your information VERY useful! I particularily like your explanation of the dbcache.

I hope you will continue to monitor this Forum and post often!
 
I just read your post with great interest. I was experiencing same Soft Reset problems with my NEW Palm T/X. I was ready to throw it out the window it was reseting several times an hour; regardless of which application I was using. Especially WiFi and Bluetooth caused me the most grief.

Following some of the suggestions you posted I was able to eliminate most Soft Resets. I still get one here and there but its not like it was. Your wondering what I did??? Disabled Auto Lock... Seems so simple and so stupid but this eliminated 80% of my soft resets.

Now if I could resolve the remaining 20% I'll be really happy. I've always loved Palm and really would NOT want to switch to a Windows Mobile PDA.

OH! yeah.. one more thing that Polish web site www.o2.pl reset my PDA too!

Anyways... velocipedist I want to say DZIEKUJE!! i pozdrawiam z Kanady!
 
Note (4 years after this thread was last updated!): recently Blazer was causing a soft reset on my TX every time I tried to run it, so on reading velocipedist's helpful entries, I looked at palmpowerups.com. Their tools memunfragment.tx and dbcachetool have been replaced by uncache. A single execution of uncache seems to have fixed the problem, as well as seeming to speed up Blazer performance overall.
 
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