[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Windows Mobile ROM Development] :
couldn't agree more on the new Builds from NRGZ28! Wonderful work from our favorite chef!

I have been playing with memory the last few days and I think I'm finally settling on a setup that works for me.. I went back and forth on having a start menu and finally decided I could live with not so pretty icons. Having a Tilt2 with around 50% free memory; yup, thats the number - ~100MB free after a reset, letting MaxSense kick in, have windows update all it's widgets, etc to play with for even a few hrs (then the slow trickle down begins) was quite an encouragement..

I am setting PP to 14MB. This gives me a system having a total of 189MB RAM.

I don't do anything fancy to disable the start menu. After a new install (latest MaxSense 23xxx build) I do the usual Sashimi/restore stuff and after all that. Then after my device is completely functional, and I am in the 68MB free memory range, I go to \Windows\Start Menu and rename the "Programs" folder to "Programs2". After a reset, I come back with close to 100MB. All the memory freed is from the GWES.exe process. It now starts with 8MB and doesn't go above 10-11MB ever(!)

Yes, the start menu is gone, but all the shortcuts are under "Program 2" and so MaxSense's "Add Quicklink" menu picks up all the old icons. So I can set the customizable Quicklinks to point to pretty much all the functionality I want in the old start menu. MaxSense's customizable "Program Link Settings" is an added bonus - I can map any of the screen components to again open any of the programs I want.

But a huge caveat : if sense hangs, I can't use any of these quicklinks. So as insurance, I map a hardware keys (2nd or 3rd function thanks to tarkim's controller cab) to open Total Commander. Once I get to total commander, I can navigate to the icons and from there access all the program icons. The "Settings" icons are all completely gone - but again, it is not too difficult to get that back,.. If you really need it, rename Programs2 back to Programs and Windows will autogenerate Start Menu (with the memory hit) in a few mins, even without a reset. So again, nothing drastic.

(One interesting thing I saw was that even if an empty "Programs" folder was present under "\Windows\Start Menu", GWES.exe swells to 25-27MB and free memory drops to the 70MB range)

So I'm rocking with Ugly Icons and a Tilt2 with lotsa RAM and loving it.. I can run pretty much anything and fast.. And to reiterate, this is with all the functionality I want in Sense - Stocks, Album, Documents Tab, Weather, Calendar, Twitter, FB, Settings. Habits die hard. I still keep and eye on the memory meter, but I'm slowly easing up...

Some days back, I posted that the mail sense tab was a big memory hog : 6-7MB gone if I enable it. So I turned it off and went with the native Windows Mail program. Now, I went back to enabling Sense Mail. I go down to the low 90s in this case, but hey I was wallowing around 30MB a few days back :cool: gotta enjoy the time till it drops there again...

I'm really glad to have been part of this memory discussion! Thanks to cmd512 for responding to me and starting this discussion and for everyone that contributed.. Loving my Tilt2 some more now.. :D