[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Farmer Ted:
I just did a first test with the 4 MB extendir.dll, and it mostly worked fine. I did screw up at first, because I sent the Extendir directory into windows; somehow, I didn't realize it needs to be on the device root.

I made a series of modified packages from my EXT's. Basically, I put all the .png's and bitmaps and what not from things like Youtube into one large zip file (each package got its own sub-directory). Everything seems to be working, except that HTC Album/fullscreen player won't launch for me (all executables and dll's are directly in windows; just the skinning stuff is in extendir). Also, I made a theme package with the DVF green theme and all of the pngs. Everything from the package appears in \windows, but the Home settings cpl doesn't recognize the .tsk file (even if you click directly on it in windows). The theme does work when the .tsk file is copied directly into windows, though. I'm not sure if the device feels any faster, but the file system index from sk tools is ~50% higher (from ~2200 to 3300). The main memory read/write speeds seem slower, though. I may need to tweak my boot rgu settings or something. I guess the replstorecachesize may need to be increased. I have it set at 800 (hex), but with a bunch more files (800 or so) in the fat file system, perhaps it should be higher.

The screencaps below show my devices virtual memory after a soft re-boot without exendir and with the 4 MB cached version of extendir. The data and fat caches are set to automatic (0) in both cases. There isn't a whole lot of real estate left in the filesystem slot (#2) with Extendir. You can certainly go to 8 MB, but I don't think that devices will boot with the 16 MB version.

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Ok, a few observations after using it a day:

-I had the PIE bug reported earlier. PIE didn't read cookies. I use a mortscript to backup/restore my cookies (during customization). The cookies were there, but I wasn't logged in to any websites, and after logging in, if I closed the browser, I again had to log in. I'm not 100% sure of this, but either PIE wasn't dumping temp files into the cache, or sk tools was unable to delete them, because I ran a clean! operation after using PIE, and it didn't clear up much storage space. Usually, it will erase a couple megs of temp files from the PIE cache.

-I went to dump replstore with sk tools, and there was no replstore. I had the extendir order set to 0, and fsreplxfilt.dll set to 11 (it's supposed to be 1). I have a dummy file on my sd card named 'replstorvol' that I will occasionally copy to the root of my device with total commander. Normally, I get an over-write message that says something like 'replace 200K file with 10 b file..." I just do it to see how big replstor is (not sure why I do this, lol). If you click 'yes,' you of course aren't allowed to over-write replstorvol. This time, it copied to the root of the device without even a message. Then I couldn't delete the darn thing, no matter what I tried. It was kind of funny.

-I have a \windows folder on my sd card, and it had virtual copies of all of the files from the \extendir\windir directory. It was kind of freaky. I checked the folder size with total commander, and it said 11.5 MB, but after flashing back to a straight rom, the folder doesn't show the extendir folders, and the folder size is normal (1 MB).

-The \Windows\System folder was messed up. It showed up as a blank, empty file (0 b). Not sure what was up with that. It showed up that way on my sd card, too, lol.

-I downloaded a cab, and was editting it with sk cab integr. Everything seemed fine, but I got a really weird error on re-building the cab, and the program wouldn't make the cab (I usually edit cabs to remove uninstall info and to put the shortcut where I want it). Also, the cab was in \my documents\personal, where I download stuff on PIE, and I couldn't delete it. After a soft reset, I could then delete the file. I was able to edit the cab and re-pack it just fine back on my normal rom. Also, the .exe from the cab showed up in the windows folder when it was in the \storage card\extendir\windir directory, but it didn't work. It worked fine in the \extendir\windir directory. (It was schap's advanced task manager, fwiw.).

I'm not sure if my boot.rgu was optimized (I'm sure it wasn't, lol), but I have to say everything just felt a little weird. The scrolling felt weird, and didn't seem to flow as smoothly as I'm used to. The file system benches were faster, but the device didn't feel any faster-it kind of felt sluggish at times. Also, it seemed like there was more of a memory leak than normal (for 6.5.3). The memory dropped really low when using PIE-I should've taken a screen shot of virtualmemory.exe, but didn't think of it.