Tweaks: Low Program Memory

[g-funkster]

Depending on how many 3rd party utilities you run, you may encounter auto-program closage, even while you may be actively using these programs. The best medicine for the low memory limits (and WM5 memory leaks) on the Q, which is about 25MB after a soft reset, is without a doubt a soft reset on a daily basis. As we all know, that can be difficult because of the dumb way the firmware on the Q works.

Throughout the day, it may be useful to run Oxios Hibernate (banner free version here), that brings back a few megabytes without closing any applications. See animated gif below, I run Oxios, all my applications are still running afterwards but my free program memory went from 14.7MB to 16.5MB:



Registry
And now for the somewhat subjective but IMO very useful memory set of entries that have alleviated auto-closage quite a bit for me. This one sets the threshold lower for the Operating System for the point at which it starts closing programs automatically. Basically, it sets the threshold to 2MB from 5MB (from here):

HKLM\System\OOM
Set "Reserved" = 2097152 decimal/200000 hex
(Default should be something like 5242880 decimal/ 500000 hex. )

I'm not sure how the next one works but it is said to have a similar effect of allowing apps to stay open (from here):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shell\LowMem
Set "ProgramMem" = 96 (Default was 80)

I can definately say this works, which of the two, beats me, maybe both. Opera Mini is a memory hog (about 5MB, java) so the OS is very quick to close this without my consent, but I spent a whole weekend with it running (and no restarts) with Mini in the background and it never closed itself. That was pretty definitive for me.

If you guys can see a difference, do post, cuz like the power saving ones, it's tough to see results immediately with tweaks like these.

[budney]

I will try this tonight and see what happens.

Thanks for posting this g-funkster!