WM5 Update Lags Badly

symphony · 07-19-06, 03:55 AM

:realmad: I have upgraded my X50v to WM5 and with time it is lagging real bad even with most of those fixes and tweaks on Solsie's thread implemented. It is almost a torture to use it now.

At first I was led to believe that this lag is inherent in all WM5 devices due to compaction thread problem, filesys, persistent memory blah blah.

But then I am now having an iPAQ rw6818 here in Asia which is rockin on WM5, it is very stable and fast. I am still having my X50v (WM5), in comparison one behaves like a hare, the other like a tortoise.

So what gives? So all the while what we believe about WM5 is naught?

Thanks for any enlightening thought.

jnev · 07-19-06, 11:54 AM

if you've read any of the posts on this forum then you'd know that wm5 on the x50v isn't all that great... on the x51v is works really well, so you can try getting dell to upgrade you if you're set on using wm5.

greenglide · 07-20-06, 07:27 AM

The compaction thread is part of WM5 on all devices as I understand it.

Because of the way in which flash memory works it is impossible to just write to it in a normal way. Basically free sectors can be written to once but then need to be erased before being written to again (there are three operations - write, read and erase). The complication comes in because the size of the block which is erased is considerably larger than the sectors which can be read and written.

The compaction thread is basically "tidying up" the memory to free space by freeing up blocks which are partly in use (holding data) and partly requiring erasure before writing (areas which have been written to and then rewritten to a new area). When a complete block is free it can be erased.

There are two types on flash memory - NAND flash and NOR flash. NOR flash is faster (generally) but requires two seconds!! for an erase operation, NAND flash is generally slower but is enormously quicker at erasure.

Once an erase operation is started it cannot be stopped so the erases effectively prevent reads and writes for two seconds with NOR flash!!

The X50 series use NOR flash, the X51 series use NAND flash so the X51 basically works with WM5.

WM5 is designed to work with NOR flash (and the greater speed of NOR flash made it a good choice up to WB2003SE because it is faster (and more expensive!!)) but DELL with the X50 and HP with the 4700 appear not to have followed the MicroSoft recommendations and used a sector size in the flash which was too large which causes immense problems with compaction.

They could, of course, fix this if they wanted but for a device which has been out of production for some time now there is no incentive to do this.

We wait ...............

rlarson_mn · 07-20-06, 09:41 AM

Most X50 users that upgraded to WM5 have pretty much reported the same. In fact many have asked for a upgrade from Dell since they purchased the X50 with the intent of gaining the features of WM5 and have gotten a replacement X51V for they trouble. Other X50 users went for an upgrade only to now go back to what they previously had in an OS simply due to what you have found. I will say that the X51V that I have which was made for WM5 works great as long as its at ROM A11 or A12.

jamin100 · 07-20-06, 09:50 AM

My x50v is working great on WM5. i have a few little bugs to iron out but nothing major.
Ive applied all (or most) of the patches and tips here and all is working fine. I have Wisbar advanced, Ilauncher and pocket breeze running on my today screen with no problems at all.

Menneisyys · 07-20-06, 12:10 PM

If you've read this, you already know the ultimate answer & solution: do NOT install/put any programs/files in the main storage and raise the registry/WinCE database writeback frequency (registry hack). It will really minimize the time filesys.exe spends at compaction (if it kicks in at all).

After having applied these registry hacks and have entirely wiped out the main storage, I have never seen any evidence of filesys.exe running (on my hx4700).