Fixing Alarm Problems in Windows Mobile Devices
My sense is that a lot of people still have trouble with appointment reminders not working on their Windows Mobile Pocket PCs or Smartphones. In fact, on my T-Mobile Dash, the alarms stopped working in the audible mode after I upgraded the device to WM6: the alarms work, but they give a vibrating notification rather than an audible one, even though the settings show that the alarms should be audible. (I address the latter problem and some additional fixes for non-working alarms in the second part of this two-part series.)
If your alarms are not working at all, there is software that can help you. MemMaid and SKTools can easily fix the problem for you. Both are commercial products, but they are inexpensive. In fact, SKTools has a “lite version” for Smartphones that is free.
These products fix the alarm problem by cleaning out your Notification Que. If your alarms are not working, the chances are real good that you have
- a lot of duplicate entries in the NQ, and/or
- an NQ that is filled with “crap.” An example of what I mean with the “crap” would be the problem I had with my Treo 700w: its NQ had about a hundred or so entries that resembled a Universally Unique Identifier, such as “550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000.” Microsoft registry entries (on Windows and on Windows Mobile) are full of these identifiers, but, generally, they do not belong in the NQ … if you see any of them in your Notification Que, you are probably safe in assuming that they are contributing to your problem.
Both MemMaid and SKTools will let you examine the que for this.
But, the nice thing about MemMaid and SKTools is that you generally don’t even have to examine the Notification Que yourself. You just use one of their menu items that says “eliminate duplicate notifications.” Then, reset your device and you should have working alarms. If not, then use these tools to examine the NQ to see if there are any of these UUID-type entries. If you find a lot of them there, you probably need to clean them out. You may want to call your tech support center for your device before doing so, though, just to ensure that you don’t delete one that is really needed. (I deleted them all on my Treo 700w, and then it worked fine.)
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[...] recent Fixing Alarm Problems with Windows Mobile Devices discussed tools for fixing problems with reminders not working at [...]
This has been the most useful article I have come across for the reminders issue. I have a Dell Axim X51v; I have used all suggestions listed here to get my notification reminders to work again. Unfortunately, they still won’t work. No sound, no flashing lights, no notification pop up even. And all settings are set on the device. Any other suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated.
Note to readers:
I suggested that KLB try out CheckNotification and ClearNotifications from ScaryBear Software, even though I had thought that the software was designed only for WM2003 devices. These solved KLB’s alarm problems.
I wrote small program, that fixes notification queue problem. http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/01/31/my-windows-mobile-does-not-sound-alarms-my-windows-mobile-alerts-whenever-it-want-to-alert.aspx
[...] with reminder alarms. (If you have a WinMo device and have reminder issues with it, check out this post and this [...]
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