Notification problems - Possible fix

[Jester573]

Greetings All,

I have been having problems with the notification queue since about two weeks after I purchased my XV6700. There have been several posts from folks that appear to have the exact same issue that I have. Generally the problem occurs when my first notification of the day does not wake up the PPC, it just waits until I hit the power button and then starts blaring. It is not limited to the system alarm, it also causes any and all notifications to suspend. If multiples are received before you hit the power button then it generally locks up and requires a soft reset and sometimes causes multiple ringings that are tough to clear.

I have tried many things to fix this such as the wakeup tweak, new ROMs, new alarm programs, cleaning the queue, deleting suspect items from the queue, etc... Nothing seemed to work.

I believe that I may have found the culprit though. There are several windows procs that run occasionally, they are clocknot.exe, calnot.exe, repllog.exe, and calupd.exe, and they do various house cleaning chores. I believe that the cause of all of my woes falls on calupd.exe, it somehow corrupts the notification queue and causes my PPC to stay asleep when the next notification is due.

I have proven this by systematically disabling each of the .exe's and causing them not to run at night, which is easier said than done as they are each set by the ROM and cannot actually be removed. BUT they can be changed.

You can effect how often they run by creating a new entry for each and setting the date far into the future, in my case I set them to run on January 1st 2010, the old entry disappears when you enter the new one and keeps it from running. Each entry even survives a soft reset, except for calupd.exe which must be re-created after each reset.

All of my notifications are now ROCK SOLID, I have not had an error for the past two weeks, which is a marathon for my PPC!! The only thing that I am concerned with is the toll for effectively disabling the cleanup procedures. I have not found any ill effect yet, but I have not had them disabled for a great length of time.

My question is: As long as I run my own maintenance now and then to clean up the crap, is there any problem with doing this???

Any insights would be appreciated...

-J

[nickm]

what exactly does calupd.exe clean?


Great find BTW

[Jester573]

I have never read where anyone has outlined exactly what calupd.exe does, but I believe that it goes through all of your calendar entries, deletes old ones, and adds notifications for new ones when needed. So if you use your calendar a lot then it may not be good for you to disable it. However, you can run it manually whenever you want to clean things up, but when doing so it schedules itself to start running nightly again.

What I need now is an .exe that would reset calupd.exe, clocknot.exe, and calnot.exe to some date like January 1, 2020 so that I could run it daily to ensure that it disables them. Then I could run the cleanups whenever I want and still be sure that they do not run at night... Unfortunately I do not have the expertise to write my own program. Any help in getting this done would be greatly appreciated!

[haus]

You said you've been trying new ROMs, but have you used a 3.5 ROM? If you ever have time to try one of the new ROMs (Unified Kitchen-based) I'd be curious if your notifications issue improves. I know this doesn't answer your original question the way you posed it but my understanding is that notifications are improved in AKU3.5. On the old ROM (2.2) I had something like 975 notifications, and after running AKU3.5 for awhile (granted not as long) I only had 21. So I think something was re-worked in there, but I may be wrong.

It does seem like you're having an unusual number of issues with notifications, though I'll admit I never use the 6700 alarm feature. I would never trust an MS Windows product for something as important as an alarm, and I'm not joking...

[Jester573]

Yep, I am currently running AKU 3.5 and it still has the same problem. I thought about installing the Unified kitchen based ROM, but it seems that they are still working out the bugs so I will probably wait a while.

Have you tried using pmclean to clean up your errant notifications? It is very simple freeware and seems to work very well. You can also run clocknot.exe. and calnot.exe from within. For the most part it seems that WM5 does very little to control the buildup even though it runs the housekeeping apps at night, from what I can tell they don't do anything constructive.

I believe that my issue may be hardware related since I have 3 friends that use the Apache running the same stuff and have never had any issues. Maybe they changed something in the chipset or had some population of processors with a Vih level problem that is keeping it asleep?? The alarm worked for about 2 weeks when I first installed 3.5 but then slowly things started going wrong, I'm not really sure why but it is due to the windows processes running at night causing some type of corruption.

I have searched around and there are many other folks, albeit few in relation to the overall install base, that are having the exact same issue that I have, but there hasn't been any solution found that I am aware of...

I am currently using SpbTime for my alarm, but it is at the mercy of the hardware that it is installed upon. I understand that I could just use a $2 alarm clock, but it is personal now, my OCD side states that I MUST find a solution...

[Jester573]

So, does anyone know of a way to permanently disable calupd.exe, calnot.exe, and clocknot.exe?

The ROM continually re-inserts it into the queue when you delete them. The only fix that I have found so far is to schedule them for some time in the future to keep them from running, but it must be done whenever a reset is performed...

[bmtbandit]

What happens if you just remove them from the ROM to begin with?

[Jester573]

I'm not sure, how would you remove them?

I would imagine that you would also need to remove whatever creates their autorun entry in the notification queue, otherwise it would just error out when it tries run at the scheduled time??

[bmtbandit]

If you are working in a kitchen, they are all located in OS\f50e9a40-aed9-497a-bdea-84451210e960. Deleteing them from that directorey will remove them from the ROM. I believe this will also remove any registry settings, and scheduleing that coorespond. Weather or not it will cause other problems will remain to be seen.

[ecamacho]

I will add to the discussion by saying that I am a Spb whore and use almost every single one of Spb's program EXCEPT Spb time. Even installed on main memory and NOT running the today plug-in it has caused the same problems you describe. Uninstalling it has been the only thing that would fix it. I talked to Spb about it briefly but never got around to fully explaining to them the problem. I suggest you try and run the phone without Spb time (like I said all the other programs run beautifully) and see if that fixes your problem.