Hello folks,
Several years ago I needed an app to allow me to adjust process priorities on my Pocket PC. At that time none existed so I wrote one. However, because of the reasons I'll explain below, I never had the guts to release it publically. But since it works fine on my newest PDA, making for a grand total of 2 Axims tested upon
, I figured I'd go ahead and release it into a private beta test, and if that goes well, then publically.
The reason for the caution is because (a) the Pocket PC wasn't designed to do this and I had to use several undocumented interfaces to bend the OS to my will
and (b) messing with priorities is in itself a dangerous thing in the hands of a novice.
But if anyone else is at all interested it this, is an ADVANCED user (someone who knows what apps are doing what on their Pocket PC, does backups, etc.), and you're brave (since other than my 2 newest Axims and the Pocket PC 2003 SDK x86 emulator this has never been run anywhere else), then you are welcome to give it a try. PocketPrioritize requires Pocket PC 2003 or later.
PocketPrioritize not only allows basic adjustment of thread priorities, but can adjust the priority of all threads of a process at once (which gives a similar effect to changing the process priority of a Win32 app in Task Manager). It also can sit and watch for applications to run and apply the priority adjustments you told it to remember automatically. That's just a quick explanation. For full details please look over:
PocketPrioritize Product Page
PocketPrioritize Documentation (Primer)
Feel free to look around at my other projects there to get an idea of what freeware I write.
I only release these in CAB form (I hate Windows installers) so you'll need to know how to copy a CAB to your device and run it to install.
Additionally, I'll make available my build for the x86 emulator, in case you want to test it out on a software emulator before your beloved hardware. I should also mention that I'm still developing in eMbedded C++ 4.0 with the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. I don't own Visual Studio .NET 2005 so I can't use the WM5 SDK, however, PocketPrioritize works fine on my Windows Media 5 device.
As for the danger of needing a hard reset, well I can't promise anything. While I personally have run PocketPrioritize from the Startup folder for years, I'd say don't do the same until you are comfortable that it behaves. However, to calm your fears a bit, on my system at least, I've never had to so much as soft reset the device due to PocketPrioritize.
So for anyone who I haven't scared away yet, please post below and I'll contact you soon. As I mentioned in another thread, I just got a new project from a client this week and it's due by the end of the week, so I might not be able to work too heavily on this until next week. But I'm not going to put it off because plans change and I've had this sitting around doing nothing for anyone but me for far too long.
Thanks all,
Greg