intermittent hung-ups

[imagelimit]

I've a very intermittent problem with TC hunging up from time to time.
This usually happens when TC sits as an inactive background task for some time, and then I call it to foreground. The title bar shows "Total Commander", but nothing else appears. When this happens it's impossible to kill TC also. The task manager reports that TC is not responding and refuses to kill it, no matter what I do. The only way to get TC back to work is a soft reset.
This happens to me from time to time, usualy 2-3 times a day, but I'm unable to trace the exact conditions. Seems pretty much random.
Does anybody experience similar problems?

[Gerry Busch]

I'd suggest you check and see if other applications do that, too. Lately it's been happening to me very often with quite a few different programs, but I don't think any individual one of them is to blame. For some reason my Jornada 565 is far less stable now than it was when I bought it over a year ago, and task switching has become a lot more difficult. I have a hardware button assigned to the memory manager (same as the applet in the control panel under Settings/System). That way I can override the lockups fairly easily.

Gerry

[imagelimit]

Gerry,

In fact, the hang-ups do not lock my Ipaq completely. I'm able to get to the memory applet in a regular way. But the memory applet is unable to terminate TC. It just reports that TC is not responding, offering an option to "end it now". If I chose this option, it's still unable to terminate TC.
Again, the OS inself is not locked. I can switch tasks, everything is snappy, other programs start, go to background and terrminate, if necessary. It's just that TC stops operating. Nothing can bring it back, other than soft reset.
As for other programs, wast majority of them behaves nicely, no problems at all. Some small fraction, mostly games, hung like TC does sometimes. In any case, OS functions remain accessible, so if any program hungs, I can use others, switch tasks, etc.
One more thing, my Ipaq uses Samsung ARM processor, rather than commonly used Intel Xscale or StrongARM. Can this make a difference? Is TC compiled with optimization for Intel processors?

[ghisler(Author)]

TC is compiled for ARM, not specially for X-Scale, so this should be no problem. Did you find any pattern when it hangs, e.g. when entering a specific directory, or after a specific file operation? TC does nothing when it is in the background, so the crash must have happened BEFORE you switched away from it, e.g. when you switched away during some file operation.

[Gerry Busch]

TC is compiled for ARM, not specially for X-Scale, so this should be no problem. Did you find any pattern when it hangs, e.g. when entering a specific directory, or after a specific file operation? TC does nothing when it is in the background, so the crash must have happened BEFORE you switched away from it, e.g. when you switched away during some file operation.

I realize that question was directed to imagelimit, but I have noticed that coming out of a file editing session can make TC vulnerable to locking up. For example, if I edit an HTML file using TC's editor, save and close it, then double-click the file to view it in Internet Explorer, IE sometimes can't come up over TC; all I get is "Internet Explorer" on the titlebar. When I then bring up the memory manager, it tells me TC is not responding, but I can usually terminate it successfully. Once I do so, up comes IE with my file!

By the way, this only happens if I save the file. If I only view it in TC's editor and close the file without saving it, I can double-click and bring it up in IE quite easily.

Again, I get this kind of behavior without running TC, as well, but I'm starting to notice that it does happen more often with TC. In my case, I'm guessing that it isn't TC's fault, but that the program is somehow more vulnerable to the instability of my PDA.

Gerry

[imagelimit]

TC is compiled for ARM, not specially for X-Scale, so this should be no problem. Did you find any pattern when it hangs, e.g. when entering a specific directory, or after a specific file operation? TC does nothing when it is in the background, so the crash must have happened BEFORE you switched away from it, e.g. when you switched away during some file operation.

Yes, at least part of hung-ups seem to have some commonalities in them. Very often I discover TC stops responding when I switch on my Ipaq on mornings. It works at night, then does not work next morning. I understand that PocketPC wakes up at 3AM or so at night to make some internal bookkeeping, advance its time, date, schedules and who knows what else. Can this dusturb TC somehow?
It looks to me that another part of hung-ups happens where memory is full and system sends shut-down commands to some background applications to free the memory. I'm not sure in this, as one never knows the exact moment when system does this, but memory is close to full when TC is not responding.
And there is yet another part of hang-ups that does not fit to any pattern I can think of.
Hope this helps. I really like TC and when it works, it's indispensable!

[imagelimit]

It looks like the problem was that TC was installed on memory card.
Once I moved it into the main memory, it works smoothly - I cross my fingers.
Is it supposed to work ok from memory card?
My SD card seems perfect, at least some 30+MB of other programs have absolutely no problem residing there.

[ghisler(Author)]

Yes, it should work fine from memory card! It sounds like WindowsCE is trying to access the memory card before the card interface is initialized when you turn the device back on.

Can anyone else reproduce this error?