Steel's beta 65 ROM/Sense ROM issues/questions

[Guest T DAWGv12]

I was wondering if anyone has had any of these issues with Steels or any of the sense ROMs. In Steels ROM thread I can’t find any complaints about similar issues with the beta 65 release so I figured I would post a separate thread. I also wasn’t sure if these things might be more related to Sense UI than the specific ROM. This is a bit lengthy but I tried to answer any foreseeable questions before they were asked.

I am going to HAVE to flash a new ROM very soon as my phone is more sluggish than it has ever been and unreliably useable at this point and I’m hoping for a little more insight before I decide what interface route I will try next. Any help/feedback is appreciated and please let me know if I am doing anything wrong!

I've been using Steels beta 65 ROM since about a week after it was posted. I switched to 65 from 55 which I had used since that was released shortly after I had first flashed beta 4. I just wanted to post some of the issues I have been having since my previous post about a couple minor issues with beta 55. I posted these in Steels ROM thread, Post #312 on page 16.

I flashed steels beta 65 ROM and also cleared all data from my storage at the same time. I'm not sure any of these problems are the ROMs “fault”. I know how WinMo stuff can be erratic at times. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. Sense has a lot of settings that I haven’t really played around with so I don’t know if there are some tweaks that might solve some of these issues. It also seems that the longer I am running this ROM the worse it seems to get. I have nothing installed except the latest version of MS My Phone and weather watcher mobile which still doesn’t work so I uninstalled that. My batteries drain down faster and faster and at this point it is really CHOKING along in anything I do from checking tasks to placing or answering a call. It also locks up fully at least once a day requiring a battery pull. I doesn’t matter how many times I reset it. I am not running any over-clocking and have performance set to auto which is what I normally run. I also stop running programs in task manager constantly, so it is rare I have more than 3 things running at once for more than 5 minutes. I also turn my phone completely off at least 2-3 times daily, sometimes to clear up an issue and sometimes to refresh the RAM.

Battery life is definitely rough. This is more of an observation, not a complaint/ problem. I run screen on auto bright and it shuts off the screen and locks after 1 minute. These were the same settings I used when the phone was stock. I got substantially longer life on a full charge with the stock ROM which I know is expected compare to the sense ROMs. I did try some over-clocking but I could basically watch the battery percentage countdown from 100 to 0 and the performance increase was not worth the excessive drain even with two batteries so I discontinued over-clocking.

The Bing app, which I updated to current, likes to randomly close to the home screen while I am in the middle of using it. The program doesn’t actually exit but I can’t find any reason it should "minimize" itself. This can happen when I'm trying to get directions or while it is in the middle of active navigation. Selecting the app after the close out seems to bring it back to where it was usually, but sometimes not. I did not encounter this with beta 55. With 55 it would close out completely and frequently during active navigation.

Another note, I copied over my saved Ferrari GT directory to see if that program would run without an actual install. I couldn't get it to run.

Opera 10 likes to crash to homescreen frequently when I try to rotate to landscape mode. Program fully closes out. I did copy over my entire saved opera 10 directory to restore my favorites and settings instead of just specific folders. I can see how that could cause a problem but when I did the same thing with beta 55 this did not seem to cause any problem at all.

Sense, or what I would guess is sense causing the problem, will frequently fail to load and appear after a screen unlock. I will see the notification bar at the top of the screen and the start, phone and menu buttons at the bottom, all seem to still function when it happens. Sometimes I can simply relock and unlock again and it loads and sometimes I will have to pull the battery completely. This can also happen when transitioning from say the main menu back to the home screen and again sometimes I can fiddle around and get it to snap out of it and sometimes I get a complete lock up and have to pull the battery.

Thanks for your time,

Tyler

[Guest amdzero]

I was wondering if anyone has had any of these issues with Steels or any of the sense ROMs. In Steels ROM thread I can’t find any complaints about similar issues with the beta 65 release so I figured I would post a separate thread. I also wasn’t sure if these things might be more related to Sense UI than the specific ROM. This is a bit lengthy but I tried to answer any foreseeable questions before they were asked.

I am going to HAVE to flash a new ROM very soon as my phone is more sluggish than it has ever been and unreliably useable at this point and I’m hoping for a little more insight before I decide what interface route I will try next. Any help/feedback is appreciated and please let me know if I am doing anything wrong!

I've been using Steels beta 65 ROM since about a week after it was posted. I switched to 65 from 55 which I had used since that was released shortly after I had first flashed beta 4. I just wanted to post some of the issues I have been having since my previous post about a couple minor issues with beta 55. I posted these in Steels ROM thread, Post #312 on page 16.

I flashed steels beta 65 ROM and also cleared all data from my storage at the same time. I'm not sure any of these problems are the ROMs “fault”. I know how WinMo stuff can be erratic at times. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. Sense has a lot of settings that I haven’t really played around with so I don’t know if there are some tweaks that might solve some of these issues. It also seems that the longer I am running this ROM the worse it seems to get. I have nothing installed except the latest version of MS My Phone and weather watcher mobile which still doesn’t work so I uninstalled that. My batteries drain down faster and faster and at this point it is really CHOKING along in anything I do from checking tasks to placing or answering a call. It also locks up fully at least once a day requiring a battery pull. I doesn’t matter how many times I reset it. I am not running any over-clocking and have performance set to auto which is what I normally run. I also stop running programs in task manager constantly, so it is rare I have more than 3 things running at once for more than 5 minutes. I also turn my phone completely off at least 2-3 times daily, sometimes to clear up an issue and sometimes to refresh the RAM.

Battery life is definitely rough. This is more of an observation, not a complaint/ problem. I run screen on auto bright and it shuts off the screen and locks after 1 minute. These were the same settings I used when the phone was stock. I got substantially longer life on a full charge with the stock ROM which I know is expected compare to the sense ROMs. I did try some over-clocking but I could basically watch the battery percentage countdown from 100 to 0 and the performance increase was not worth the excessive drain even with two batteries so I discontinued over-clocking.

The Bing app, which I updated to current, likes to randomly close to the home screen while I am in the middle of using it. The program doesn’t actually exit but I can’t find any reason it should "minimize" itself. This can happen when I'm trying to get directions or while it is in the middle of active navigation. Selecting the app after the close out seems to bring it back to where it was usually, but sometimes not. I did not encounter this with beta 55. With 55 it would close out completely and frequently during active navigation.

Another note, I copied over my saved Ferrari GT directory to see if that program would run without an actual install. I couldn't get it to run.

Opera 10 likes to crash to homescreen frequently when I try to rotate to landscape mode. Program fully closes out. I did copy over my entire saved opera 10 directory to restore my favorites and settings instead of just specific folders. I can see how that could cause a problem but when I did the same thing with beta 55 this did not seem to cause any problem at all.

Sense, or what I would guess is sense causing the problem, will frequently fail to load and appear after a screen unlock. I will see the notification bar at the top of the screen and the start, phone and menu buttons at the bottom, all seem to still function when it happens. Sometimes I can simply relock and unlock again and it loads and sometimes I will have to pull the battery completely. This can also happen when transitioning from say the main menu back to the home screen and again sometimes I can fiddle around and get it to snap out of it and sometimes I get a complete lock up and have to pull the battery.

Thanks for your time,

Tyler

could you run this program before you jump off of 65?

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/t...p;ts=1280243868

it is an indicator that runs in the taskbar.

open batt config, change content to only one indicator, and make it free ram.

soft reset, and see how much ram is available. Watch the indicator as sense loads, and open a few programs to see how it affects memory. Also open Opera, as this is a MAJOR memory hog.

Post back your results, it may help others.

[Guest T DAWGv12]

could you run this program before you jump off of 65?

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/t...p;ts=1280243868

it is an indicator that runs in the taskbar.

open batt config, change content to only one indicator, and make it free ram.

soft reset, and see how much ram is available. Watch the indicator as sense loads, and open a few programs to see how it affects memory. Also open Opera, as this is a MAJOR memory hog.

Post back your results, it may help others.

I enabled only Free MB indicator and here is what followed:

94MB when indicator first appears

54MB slowly counted down to 54 over about a minute jumped back to 58MB then settled around 55MB and stayed right about that for about 4 more minutes

45MB and five minutes later and finally homescreen appears. Used to only take 30-45 seconds for homescreen to appear after it says launching steel sense.

38MB after watching the homescreen and doing nothing else for about 3 more minutes it seems to settle here.

So its been about 10 minutes and I'm at 38 MB without doing anything.

Now I launch opera 10 to the quick-launch/speed-dial screen.

26MB is where it settles in with opera running in the background.

Let me know if there is anything else you would like me to run through.

Note: I copied the battclock.cab to my SD card via my PC's SD slot and it would not let me install it from the card once I put it in the phone and resetting several times, this is how I install just about everything. I finally got it to install by plugging the phone in via USB and copying the battclock.cab to my phones storage and running it from there.

[Guest amdzero]

I enabled only Free MB indicator and here is what followed:

94MB when indicator first appears

54MB slowly counted down to 54 over about a minute jumped back to 58MB then settled around 55MB and stayed right about that for about 4 more minutes

45MB and five minutes later and finally homescreen appears. Used to only take 30-45 seconds for homescreen to appear after it says launching steel sense.

38MB after watching the homescreen and doing nothing else for about 3 more minutes it seems to settle here.

So its been about 10 minutes and I'm at 38 MB without doing anything.

Now I launch opera 10 to the quick-launch/speed-dial screen.

26MB is where it settles in with opera running in the background.

Let me know if there is anything else you would like me to run through.

Note: I copied the battclock.cab to my SD card via my PC's SD slot and it would not let me install it from the card once I put it in the phone and resetting several times, this is how I install just about everything. I finally got it to install by plugging the phone in via USB and copying the battclock.cab to my phones storage and running it from there.

Thats odd about the cab install, but anyways that seems to be REAL low for memory. Go into windows\startup and delete all the icons (well except the one that .mscr that enables the call button to work).

then soft reset and see how the memory loads.

It would seem that a change in PagePool for this rom would help a bit. I have mine set to 12MB instead of the standard 20MB.

[Guest T DAWGv12]

Thats odd about the cab install, but anyways that seems to be REAL low for memory. Go into windows\startup and delete all the icons (well except the one that .mscr that enables the call button to work).

then soft reset and see how the memory loads.

It would seem that a change in PagePool for this rom would help a bit. I have mine set to 12MB instead of the standard 20MB.

The only thing in the My Device/Windows/Start Up folder is a file icon that looks like a parchment paper with some writing on it called zzzzz2, google searching did not help me figure out what this is. Should I just go ahead and delete that?

I also have view all files enabled.

Thanks again amd

Edited July 27, 2010 by T DAWGv12

[Guest amdzero]

The only thing in the My Device/Windows/Start Up folder is a file icon that looks like a parchment paper with some writing on it called zzzzz2, google searching did not help me figure out what this is. Should I just go ahead and delete that?

I also have view all files enabled.

Thanks again amd

no don't delete that. it is what enables phone canvas at start up. it would appear the rom is starving for Ram. could you disable sense/soft reset and post the Ram after the system settles?

[Guest T DAWGv12]

no don't delete that. it is what enables phone canvas at start up. it would appear the rom is starving for Ram. could you disable sense/soft reset and post the Ram after the system settles?

After disabling sense and reseting it appears to settle around 71MB.

Note: I also could see a complete reflash of this same ROM working more like it should without any explainable reason at all. I'm simply surprised at how much of a mess this is running like considering the fact that I DON'T play around with much of anything and I really use just a few of the basic winmo/sense features. I'm not really pushing the O2's limits by any stretch.

Edited July 27, 2010 by T DAWGv12

[Guest mdkpnj]

I start with about 90m and it drops as Sense loads. I installed the lastest version of CHTedit. Before I typically ran around 20 mb wth sense and a few things open. Now I am running closer to 45m. The latest CHTeditor does not start the programs for tabs you you have disabled, saves alot of memory.

[Guest D15kid]

I am having very similar issues with the .65

[Guest brainstorm03]

I start with about 90m and it drops as Sense loads. I installed the lastest version of CHTedit. Before I typically ran around 20 mb wth sense and a few things open. Now I am running closer to 45m. The latest CHTeditor does not start the programs for tabs you you have disabled, saves alot of memory.

Hopefully not a dumb question, but how did you install the updated CHT over the cooked in one? I tried and wouldn't install over the current one and completely screwed it up. When I deleted everything and restarted it went back to the original again.

[Guest mdkpnj]

Hopefully not a dumb question, but how did you install the updated CHT over the cooked in one? I tried and wouldn't install over the current one and completely screwed it up. When I deleted everything and restarted it went back to the original again.

It is CHTEditor 1.8.5, I found a link i think on Modaco if not on XDA. It installed normally for me, in main memory. I think I restarted sense then when into the home tab editor in sense settings and disabled the music and photo tabs, and restarted sense again. Right now with 4 things open (pocket informant, email, media player, and file explorer) i am at 30mb free.

[Guest bmt10]

It would seem that a change in PagePool for this rom would help a bit. I have mine set to 12MB instead of the standard 20MB.

Adjusting the page pool is definitely needed for this rom, 20mb leaves way to little for running it without restarting it every few hours. I set it to 10 for my flash and it holds at around 38-45mb when idling with no programs open.

I tried to update the home tab editor but it gave me a version mismatch error until I installed the updated version.(found a registry fix for this in the CHTeditor thread and it seems to be working).

Edited August 13, 2010 by bmt10

[Guest Plebius20]

I have had the same problems as T-Dawg... but love this Rom completely. I would love to know the answer to his problems as well. The bing app seems to only work when not using anything else or moving the phone and not allowing the screen to lock either. The slacker radio app works but sometimes shuts down without any rhyme or reason (though it does a great job pausing when recieving a phone call!) And opera tanks alot hell even more than it did on the ole Samsung OS.

[Guest Steel Reign]

I have had the same problems as T-Dawg... but love this Rom completely. I would love to know the answer to his problems as well. The bing app seems to only work when not using anything else or moving the phone and not allowing the screen to lock either. The slacker radio app works but sometimes shuts down without any rhyme or reason (though it does a great job pausing when recieving a phone call!) And opera tanks alot hell even more than it did on the ole Samsung OS.

A update to fix these issues and more will be coming soon, probably by next month... I've been really busy with college lately, so I haven't been able to work much on it... But rest assured, a fix is coming!