Fixing Alarm Problems in Windows Mobile Devices

Posted on July 3, 2007 by Bruce Keener

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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  • KLB

    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.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

    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.

  • http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir Tamir

    I wrote small program, that fixes notification queue problem.

    http://goo.gl/CbUw

  • Jacob

    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.

  • Martin Risk

    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.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

    You might want to also try the following for a couple of more tools

    http://goo.gl/JWie

  • lechup

    For WM 6.1 and no notification at all problem try pmClean http://www.pocketmax.net/redial.html! Works like a charm!

    • Transformer

      pmClean worked like a charm for me too…Thanks!! :)
      HTC Herald WM 5

  • Josh Burkart

    it’s queue, not que

  • Clive

    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

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Thanks for sharing this, Clive. Sharing experiences is a great way for us to learn how to fix problems.

    • Maria Spiliotopoulou

      Thank you so much Clive! For days, I’ve been trying to solve this non-alarm issue and it was driving me crazy as I missed appointments and tasks! I just synchronized my HTC Touch with the PC and it all came back to normal! I hadn’t synchronized them for days, but I could never imagine that this could solve my problem.
      Thanks again!
      Maria, from Greece

      • Clive

        Hi Maria,
        Only a pleasure – glad to have helped! I’ve just moved onto the iPhone 4g. Loving it but ironically missing the snooze feature which the Windows Mobile phones do so well.
        Regards,
        Clive

  • Arpad Orfi

    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

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Thank you very much, Arpad, for the nice compliments. And thank you for sharing your experience with alarm problems and their fixes.

  • http://www.punknewwave.com Murray

    Does anyone have an application or some sort of modification that let’s you customise various other elements of how Outlook works on Windows Mobile 6.1?

    I’d love it if you could set how the Appointment Alarms work. Ideally, I like to have to option for it to beep, and/or vibrate, but for the screen to stay off!

    My HTC Touch Diamond wakes up, and the touchscreen comes on, and I’m always calling people in my pocket, because an appointment alarm has gone off. Terrible design, Microsoft/HTC.

    Another big problem is that when I Cut and Paste appointments around in Outlook on the HTC Touch Diamond, it ALWAYS jumps the highlighted time to the current time of day, after pasting an appointment. This may be 2 in the morning when I’m going through cutting and pasting appointments, and the calendar is always jumping to 2am after every time I paste! This is so annoying, because I have to scroll back down to where I’m working, which is generally between 9am and 10pm. Worst of all, it does it TWICE! It does it once, straight after I paste, then after about 2 seconds, it does it AGAIN! It jumps back to highlighting the 2am slot again. Infuriating!

    Does anyone have any applications or tweaks that prevent either of these two problems occurring?

    Thanks!

    - Murray