yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
Unfortunately I have to agree with you - I don't know *why*, but I got woken up this morning at 7:05 a.m by my Sagem. Glared at myself for shutting down the Wizard at first (hey, you never know), but I brought the Wizard out of standby and it was all bells and whistles.

Well, on to the next alarm for me - my Sagem will save my butt if the Wizard fails. In the end, though, I'll probably keep my Wizard out of standby and simply with the screen off - that's yet to fail on me (must be a couple of months since my last pot about the alarms issue and when I started trying the WakeUp thing) and is safer with other notifications as well.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] cbrow51:
On thing I did find with PocketWake up is it appears very sensitive to how you set the alarm up in the first place.

For example, if you set an alarm and then immediately turn the phone off (into stand by) the alarm does not go off. I think it is the issue described in the first post... So I set the alarm parameters and just let the device go into stand by on its own (mine is set to 2 mins) then alarms worked fine.

I try PocketAlarm too...

Regards

chris
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] Puckster:
I keep the AC charger beside my bed and use my sleep time to charge the k-jam as it is in use nearly all other times (especially now i have push email :D ) I then have it set to turn the backlight off but not sleep on external power therefore never missing a single alarm.

This setup means that i always have the battery full for the long day ahead as well as making sure i actually get out of bed to use it :wink:

Cheers
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] andonevris:
I use a program called ptravel alarm.

I've had it for a while now, on both my mda compact and now vario. It has never failed to go off in that time.

Features I like,

Alarm volume independant of system volume (will still ring through if phone is muted)

Today screen plugin which shows the current status of your alarms. Useful if you need to quickly check alarm.

RELIABLE

http://www.handango.com/PlatformPro...6806&Ntt=travel alarm&productId=16589&R=16589
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
Yep, that's what I'd been doing. One note - instead of just letting the backlight turn off, consider getting a utility that will turn the entire screen off. Otherwise you may eventually suffer from LCD 'burn-in' (charge persistance)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
The question is - did you ever have failing alarms - e.g. with the built-in alarm options - before ?

If you've never had problems before, it's impossible to tell whether this software is 'reliable', or whether you're just one of the happy people who never had the problem referred to to begin with :)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ammar:
Hi all,

i know that not all wizards are reacting the same way regarding the alarm issue but this is what happend with mine. i had the same problem as all of you and my alarm was failing all the time until i installed an old software which i was using with my old wm 2003. it is from the same maker of (checknotify) program, it is called (clearnotify) what is does is each time you soft reset your PPC it will automatically remove dublicated notifies from system data. No icons or shortcuts only an exe file in the startup folder.

now my alarm is working like a charm.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
that's been in my startup, and Check Notifications is run regularly, for ages - 'fraid it's no 100% solution for the failing alarms :/ Does help perfectly with not getting alarms I'm not supposed to, though
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] andonevris:
Yes, I did have failing alarms, which is why I went hunting for different solutions.

Ptravelalarm has NEVER failed once to activate an alarm. I've been using it long enough now to trust my vario as my only alarm.

Give it a go, it's free to try

:)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
d'oh.. nevermind, I had tried pTravelAlarm already (apparently completely forgetting the name) - no go. In fact, they also state that indeed it may fail. Check way at the bottom of the page;

http://www.burroak.on.ca/pta.html

"If you have a Windows Mobile 2003 device and are experiencing problems with alarms, please see the WakeupTweak application."

That same problem appears to plague various WM2003SE and WM5 devices.

I then tried WakeUpTweak, and the "Always wake up PPC to full power mode" option therein did make sure I never missed an alarm - at a cost: the device would randomly blink on and back off.. usually stopping after a while (30 minutes, few hours).

Edit: clarification - it would stop the blinking behavior after a while, it wouldn't 'stop working' - it was just fine :) But the blinking drained a lot of battery and in general just annoyed the crap out of me. No fault of the developers' - some events try to bring the device out of standby, but not to full power on.. with the tweak in place, they do go to full power on (hence the tweak's name), and so you get it blinking on/off. Well, on - and back off again if you have it set to go to standby after N minutes :)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Crap, back to the drawing board...
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
ZeBoxx, what is your experience of not shutting the phone down (backlight and LCD off)? What sort of effect on battery life?

I'd like to turn the screen off instead of going in to standby, but don't like the fact that the buttons are still active when not in Standby... perhaps we can develop a program that gives the impression of standby (screen off, buttons locked) but none of the disadvantages (alarms!)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] wizardragon:
I never tried an alarm - but i noticed the backlight would not come out of standby - perhaps the two problems are realated.

I fixed it by finding someone with a similar problem who had fixed it on MoDaCo.

Wher urye n scoatlin, amfrae glesga so um ur?
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
Over 8 hours, battery was down 4% over having it in standby. I'll take those 4% if it means reliable alarms :) Especially as, like mentioned above, I charge the phone overnight anyway.

I'll see if I can dig up the results again or get you one for full drainage in both modes with PocketBatteryAnalyzer... see if there's any quiet day coming up where I can stick my current SIM in my old phone :)

I think Mort Saver does that? Not entirely sure - I haven't tried it. I've not had a problem with buttons getting pressed randomly when turning the screen off.

A couple of notes, though...

1. If you only turn the backlight off, you might suffer - eventually - from LCD 'burn in' (charge persistance). So anybody wanting to pursue this, please do get a utility that turns the whole screen off, and not just the backlight.

2. If you've got a bunch of active applications, I suspect that just turning the screen off will drain much more than the 4% I mentioned. This is probably especially true if you've got active Today Screen items. This is conjecture - I haven't tested - but it would make sense as the applications would still be running in the background, you just can't see them. I don't think this would be much of a problem except with the most busy of Today items though (Baseball Today game, Animated Theme stuff - most others (e.g. today screen 'launch' applications) don't refresh all the time and hardly use any CPU)

3. This is only my experience. I'm quite confident that, given that the whole issue is related to the device coming out of standby, not letting the device to go to standby is a 100% solution - but I'm still just one guy, and you would do well to check others' experiences with this before committing to it.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] x-X-x:
I'm using re-occuring appointment as an alarm and had no prob so far.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] dvinnola:
I have had success with pTravelAlarm. At first I installed to to the mini-SD card, and the notification turned on the screen, but the device locked up (I assum) because it couldn't launch the program from the card on wakeup. I have moved it to main memory, and am doing fine.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] andonevris:
Have you tried the tweak with just the default settings? The develpers don't recommend using the "always wake up ppc..." option.

Personally I didn't even need the tweak, it cured my alarm problems as soon as I installed it .

Oh BTW as someone has also mentioned you must install to main memory for it to work properly.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
Of course - that didn't work, so that's why I tried the 'wake up to full' option :\

I didn't have my MiniSD card at the time yet - so it was installed to main memory :) Even now I have only 2 applications on the storage card because of so many reported problems with applications on the storage card :\
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] GerooTech:
PTAlalrm

i am using the ptalarm for a while and it is doing fine for me, also i have installed it on my SD, but it fails to wake up, when i installed it to main memory it works like a charm.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] stegz:
pTravelAlarm is what I use, and I must stress before anyone relies on it that it is not reliable at all.

Again, the fault lies in wm5. With my O2 XDA Mini S, if I switch it off (standby) overnight, the alarm does not sound at 6am as planned. Then when I turn on the phone (at, say, quarter to 8!!) the alarm sounds. However, what I do notice just before that is that the clock is at 00:00 then jumps to the correct time - then the alarm sounds. The notifications are obviously being created correctly, but the phone does not know what time it is!
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
That's interesting. I have noticed before that turning the device on, for about half a second the clock shows as the time it was when I put it into standby, then corrects itself. I don't think that it is anything to do with the clock being the wrong time, however, I think it's just the fact that the screen hasn't been updated - but I notice you said it shows as 0:00... did you use that as an example, or does it always show as 0:00? That could be quite significant - as the Wizard runs certain calendar/alarm based cleanup/notify tasks at midnight... perhaps one of those is the cause of our alarm woes!
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] mobileadam:
Although I don't use the alarms I do have the issue where the clock is not showing the correct time when it is turned back on. It will always update very quickly but it clearly has the time displayed when the unit was turned off. I think this issue is related since I have a sync schedule set for every 15 mins and I might know I have new mail but the Vario isn't telling me this because it hasn't checked since it was last switched off. When you power it back on the clock is updated and instantly the GPRS / Activesync process starts and it goes off and syncs. If I am quick enough I can stop the current activesync process and see that the last time it tried to sync was some hours before (possibly when I switched the thing off) and not 15 mins ago when it should have.

This follows the same behaviour as the alarms, in that once powered back on it trys to catch up with everything it has missed and all the alarms start.

So I feel the clock not updating is more than a display issue although I don't know why it happens, whether it is a case of not enough memory / resources to keep the time updated?
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] edsub:
I noticed CheckNotifications does not work ok on my 2.8 Qtek rom. It allways hangs when I take the action to remove duplicate notifications. I noticed that when this happens the wip counter on the screens says something like "Processing 25 of 24"

Seems like a loop programming error to me. never had this on WM2003 with this same software.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
edsub - I get that on my ROM when there's a "Null" event in the list - have to clear it out specifically first before using the "Clear All" button.

The number going 1 over the actual count seems to always happen even when it works fine.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
I don't use GPRS sync, so I have no experience of this, but it does seem to be similar to the alarm problem. One question - can you reproduce this? Does it happen all the time, or just from time to time?

Biggest problem with trying to solve this issue is the fact that it happens randomly - finding a way to easily reproduce it will help us solve it.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] mobileadam:
I haven't really tried to reproduce it - I will try to run loads of programs and turn off it and see if this causes a problem. Although I have noticed this 'refresh' problem from day one it only occurs occasionally and has only happened once this week. If I get any joy I will post some details.

Adam
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ccrrazzzy:
Fixed???? Worth a try!

Worked for me so far, over 40 alarms per day! My device is set to sleep after 30 seconds.

http://xdaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=254799#254799

Latest Beta is working good.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] BullShark:
I have found a FREE Alarm Clock and it works GREAT. I have found no problem with it & a few of my friends also use it with no missed alarms.

It's called "AlarmClock Ver.0.04".

Here is the url to dl it.

http://page.freett.com/todamitsu/AlarmClockE.htm
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
I think we can safely say there is an inherent flaw in the notification system in WM5, so any alarm program which uses it (which is ALL OF THEM!) is vulnerable to the problem.

Just because a program works for one user "100% of the time" does not mean it will work for every other user, nor does it mean it actually will work 100% of the time for that particular user. By all means, try what other people suggest, but if you follow this thread you'll see there have been a number of solutions offered which someone thought was the holy grail, but which turned out to fail when someone else tried them. That's the problem with this bug, it is not easy to reproduce - it happens randomly. That is the worst kind of bug, believe me, as a Test Analyst, I know!

If we could reliably reproduce the bug whenever we want, then we could test what actually works, but the problem is it happens randomly, so sure, you might THINK one program solves the problem, and you'll go on thinking that until it randomly fails one day! If anyone can make their alarm fail 100% of the time, and can document the steps taken to make sure it fails, then we'll be 90% of the way there to find a solution!
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Reading over the beta notes for AlarmToday (http://www.pocketmax.net/alarmToday.htm beta:http://www.pocketmax.net/smf/index.php?board=24.0), the author seems to be trying to address the WM5 alarm problem, but it appears some people are still having problems with it. It seems his WM5 wakeup trick is a patch which keeps the phone awake a little longer at midnight (when the alarm/notification cleanup is run) - this is something I had thought might help since stegz's post earlier in the thread, where the clock was sticking at 0:00. I'd urge others to try AlarmToday, and what ccrrazzzy suggested in his post, and report back their findings here.

Maybe the problem can be solved as simply as having a little program wake up the device at 23:59 every night, and put it to sleep again at 0:01, making sure the device is fully awake when the WM5 calendar/alarm cleanup is run.[/url]
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] jmiller2000:
I was also annoyed by this problem a couple of months ago. After reading a blog about WM5 standby modes, the solution I found was to use the utility "ScreenLock" instead of going into standby. Since then I have not had any alarm problems, and the effect on battery life is negilible.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
yip... although it'd be nice to have a solution for the alarms, it won't help with appointments and anything else using the notification queue when the thing is in standby.. sure-fire solution is not to go standby.

Even Microsoft themselves are probably going to step away from all the various power modes and go with 'always on'; used on smartphones.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Hey ZeBoxx, I've been using MortSaver for the past couple of days, and my battery use seems quite high in comparison to your's. What settings are you using for MortSaver?

I had an idea to reduce the battery drain - I've made a link for MortSaver which uses OmapClock to underclock the processor before it turns the screen off...

OmapClock.exe -clock 162 -launch MortSaver.exe -restore

My usual clock speed is set to 216MHz when turned on. Now, the problem is I can't check if it actually does underclock the device while MortSaver is activated... I have a feeling it is just dropping the speed to the normal 180...

perhaps we can develop a solution which brings together the functionality of OmapClock, MortSaver and SmartSKey so that during use we can have a high clock speed, and when not in use we drop the speed to below normal, and when we turn it on again it resumes the high speed... What I'd really like to work out is if it's possible to intercept the Standby button to run MortSaver instead of turning the device off... I suspect this isn't possible, but it would be cool if we could.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
I'm not using mortsaver, myself - I use the 'screen off' application that comes with psShutXP
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] RizzzO:
How's the battery use when using "screen off" im comparison with the normal standby?
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] ZeBoxx:
I noticed about 4% more with the screen off than using standby over a period of roughly 8 hours. Note however that...

- no applications were left running

- today screen had no fancy plugins that continually updated

- I'm not sure how the behavior is further down the line - e.g. 100% to 96% always seems to go slower than e.g. 10% to 6%.

In general, as I normally charge my phone overnight anyway, I can't say I see any ill effects from it that would outweigh the benefits.. if it drained half the battery, I certainly wouldn't use this route :)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
I seem to be getting mixed results with MortSaver. Some days it goes a couple of hours and stays 100% battery, other days it will drop about 15% in the same amount of time. I'm experimenting to see what is affecting it.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] stegz:
After my previous comment that I noticed the time updating from 00:00 when I switched it on manually (usually once I'd slept in) I now make sure I've had it on after 00:00 (even if only briefly) and I've not missed an alarm in two weeks with PTravelAlarm.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Interesting. How frequently did your alarm fail before you did this? I'll start writing something next week as soon as I get back to my desktop to turn the phone on for 00:00 every night... have patience!
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] mrfil13:
Ive been using PocketAlarm for a few days (using an lod mobile as a backup alarm). the alarm is set to go off at 7:30 every morning, when i took my phone out of standby this morning the clock said 7:30 then jumped to 7:33 then the alarm went off.

Now you were saying about windows clearing stuff up at midnight, i found this program for 2003 that is for a problem that sound similar

http://www.pocketpcfreeware.com/en/index.php?soft=876

basically says that at midnight windows powers up for 15 seconds to do its checks etc, but 15 secs sometimes is not enough, this extends that time. dont know if its valid for WM5.

I was thinking of using PocketAlarm to set an alarm off for about 3 mins at 11:59pm every night. As you can set-up multiple alarms you will be able to create a silent alarm that basically will wake the system up for x amount of time. will try it out next week when im at work.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] 1-2tje:
@ elyl

Maybe you can use the CeRunAppAtTime API call to launch an application on or around midnight. I'm not much of a programmer myself but maybe you're interested: http://www.pocketpcdn.com/articles/cerunappattime.html
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] tdk007:
Alarm Works!

I upgraded from the Qtek AKU2 to the new O2 AKU2 ROM, and the Alarm clock now works correctly and calendar notifications now work correctly.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Re: Alarm Works!

Both based on the same code, so shouldn't make any difference. You probably got lucky.

I'll have a test version of my software up soon(ish) - not got lots of time to develop, unfortunately.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] tdk007:
Re: Alarm Works!

I think there's a little more than luck going on, as the Comm Manager also shutsdown without any error's as well.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] Andy-M:
Re: Alarm Works!

I also upgraded the ROM for my O2 Xda Mini S and switched to using Pocket WakeUp. Since then the alarm has worked every day for the last 3 weeks. Before it would fail nearly every day. In addition the calendar reminders haven’t failed since the upgrade, before they would fail occasionally.

I upgraded the ROM via http://xda.o2.co.uk/xdaMiniSoftware.aspx?a=true (this is only for O2 UK and Ireland customers)

The new ROM version is 2.21.4.1 WWE

ROM date: 3/9/06

Radio version: 02.07.10

Protocol version 413.1.03

ExtROM version: 2.21.4.101

After the upgrade I noticed the version of Windows Mobile 5.0 is also more up-to-date and the new version is 5.1.195 (Build 14847.2.0.0)

It also fixes other problems, such as Windows Media Player forgetting the play list when songs are on the mini SD card and the phone is switched off too long. There are also other minor improvements and changes to the calendar, Today screen and Comm Manager.

I would be interested in knowing if anyone else still has problems with their alarm and reminders after upgrading to the above version. For now I won't be relying on it completely, but it certainly looks promising.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] TheGMan:
Please tell me that this thread is not dead.

I am a very willing tester if anyone needs assistance.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
It's on sabbatical. I'm awaiting the results of the AKU2.2/2.5 ROMs to see if it solves anything before beginning development.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] elyl:
Yeah, keeping your phone on charge overnight does definitely work. The Spb trick is similiar to other tweaks, like WakeUpTweak. As far as we can tell, it makes the problem better, but doesn't cure it.
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] mrnikt:
Elyl .. Glad it helped you.

But remember that charging MUST be not from USB (craddle) but from mains...

And SPB -yes it's very similar to other tweaks ....BUT it works with WM5 :)
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] asmout:
Another vote for AlarmClock v0.4

Hi,

I have tried a large number of alarm programs, and none of them are reliable except for AlarmClock (http://page.freett.com/todamitsu/AlarmClockE.htm). The website for this freeware product advertises that source code is available, but the link is broken. However, you could try contacting the developer directly (his email is linked from the bottom of that page).

With all other programs I get the bug where the alarm only happens when I turn the device on. This seems to be mitigated if I tediously wait several minutes before pressing the sleep/power button. But with AlarmClock, all is fine. It works great, EVERY time.

I have not tried pTravelAlarm, it may also work, I cannot comment.

I have tried wakeup treaks & notification clearing, to no real avail.

Cheers,

Andy
[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] Turist:
Unfortunately it seems like we still have no reliable solution :(

Funny situation: hundreds of willing beta-testers, but nothing to test. As a member of russian wizard community i can say, that nearly all useres are interested in solving it.