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.)
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
Tamir’s program did not fix my extraneous alarm problems, but ScaryBear Software CheckNotifications did. I just used it to manually delete some extraneous alarms. Google ’scarybear checknotifications’. I have Windows Mobile 6.1.
I would appreciate help with this vexatious issue of Win Mob 6.1 calendar alarms. Generally this does sound alarm as requested, but occasionally not. Seems this is worst when transferring a reminder to different date. MS support is miserable; though several sources specified it is their bug, they have no information & refer me back to cellphone provider. I’ll contact the 2 solutions in this post, but all further recommendations, & especially identification of the MS KB document will be useful.
You might want to also try the following for a couple of more tools
http://www.keenerliving.com/2007/07/06/fixing-alarm-problems-in-windows-mobile-devices-additional-tips/
For WM 6.1 and no notification at all problem try pmClean http://www.pocketmax.net/redial.html! Works like a charm!
pmClean worked like a charm for me too…Thanks!!
HTC Herald WM 5
it’s queue, not que
Thanks for the article and comments.
My reminders (appointments) on my HTC Touch stopped “reminding” me. No audio and no visual alarm, even though the events were correctly entered in the calendar. Luckily my alarm clock feature was still working.
From someone’s comment, I thought to try Active Sync my device to my PC. Setting up a test reminder thereafter, and the reminders are now working again!
I have previously had the same problem and a soft reset (by the concealed button on the device) solved the problem. This time, neither a hard- nor soft-reset solved the problem – just a sync.
Hope this helps someone.
Regards,
Clive
Thanks for sharing this, Clive. Sharing experiences is a great way for us to learn how to fix problems.
I have a different problem: sometimes unwanted clock-alarms go off at
unpredictable times. (i.e. I set an alarm few days before for 7AM, but then
afterwards I cleared all the check boxes in alarm settings. Even so, few
days later, this 7AM alarm goes off.)
pmClean doesn’t solve this problem — it only eliminates duplicate notifications, but this is not that.
alarmToday (also from http://www.pocketmax.net) CAN do it. With that it is easy to manually delete those 6-7 alarms that not needed and only leaved there because of a Windows Mobile bug.
Bruce, I congratulate to your great site, http://www.dkeener.com/keenstuff/index.html
There are really useful tips that are easy to implement after reading just a few minutes, and also tips for the more enthusiast, your fantastic summary about Getting Thins Done and Covey 7Habits philosophy. Thanks for that!
Arpad
Thank you very much, Arpad, for the nice compliments. And thank you for sharing your experience with alarm problems and their fixes.