Deskfree Recycle 1.0 - The Natural Defragger
- Would you like to fit more on your PalmPilot?
- How about a faster PalmPilot?
- Tired of insufficient memory messages during HotSync?
- Did you know the F word among PalmPilot users is 'Fragmentation'?
Deskfree Recycle optimizes your PalmPilot memory for increased storage and greater speed. It is dubbed the "Natural" defragger because it uses only the official programming interface, rather than playing around with undocumented memory structures. It performs with varying levels of automation to suit your needs.
Deskfree Recycle may be scheduled to run daily at a specified time. You can wake up every day to a freshly tidied PalmPilot. Simply select the Schedule menu option and choose the time you wish Recycle to run every day. To cancel the schedule, select the Schedule menu item and tap the "No Time" button. If you are using PalmOS 2.02 or earlier, you should cancel the schedule before upgrading or deleting Recycle.
With PalmOS 2, you can assign Recycle to the HotSync button. Press and hold the HotSync button and Recycle will defragment your PalmPilot and then start the HotSync for you. To use this mode of automation, go to Preferences application and select the Button panel and then choose HotSync and assign Recycle to the Cradle button. Then press the cradle button for about one second and Recycle will defragment and then run HotSync to install any new applications. All with a single button press.
Don't care for automation? Well simply run Recycle and press the 'Defragment' button.
Action
Recycle defragments your memory, automatically soft resets your PalmPilot and reinstalls your Hackmaster extensions and shows you a summary of the before and after fragmentation statistics. The soft reset is necessary to reinitialize some PalmPilot applications.
Requirements
Recycle works all models and memory sizes from 128K to 3 Meg and beyond. Recycle requires PalmOS Version 1.06 or higher, as it builds on the improved memory management facilities introduced in v1.06.
Application Compatibility Reports
J-OS and other complex system extensions that change the language of the PalmPilot are reported to cause a fatal error as they attmept to operate during the Recycle. Disable these extensions before Recycling.
If you have any difficulty using Recycle, try disabling hacks first. If you find any application of hack that conflicts with Recycle please let us know.
Version Alert
Recycle Version 1.0 takes a very large amount of time to run if there is too little free memory to efficiently rearrange the rest of the memory. Currently we advise not running Recycle with less than 30K free (45K for 3 Megabyte systems). The time is also very long if there are thousands of records on your Palm.
Registration
The Trial version of Deskfree Recycle may be used for 30 days. The full version of
Recycle is available at PalmGearHQfor $12.
What is fragmentation?
Memory fragmentation is the problem that causes PalmPilot memory to be reported full while still only 80-90% used. Fragmentation also can slow your PalmPilot. When requesting a memory block larger than the maximum size available, PalmOS will have to try to reorganize the memory to attempt to create a block of memory large enough to satisfy the request.
Many people will be familiar with the concept of disk defragmentation, the process of re-ordering files stored on the hard disk to improve access speed. While PalmPilot memory defragmentation sounds like a similar process, it has subtlely different goals.
Most importantly, PalmPilot memory is divided into 'heaps' of 64K each. Thus on a PalmPilot with 1 Megabyte of memory, you will have 16 heaps available for storage. This is more like storage on a pile of floppy disks, rather than one big storage space on a hard disk.
So, why is this important? All PalmPilot memory allocations must come from only one heap. They cannot span heaps. This means that there is a maximum allocation size of 64K. It also means that if you have a PalmPilot that is half full, with 32K free in each heap, then you will be unable to install an application with a 40K code size, such as outliner, database and time/expense recording applications.
Your PalmPilot could be 10% free and still not be able to install this application. Recycle gives you back your memory.
Try out Recycle for yourself. Here it is
Recycle is shareware. If you find Recycle is useful, you must register it. The registration fee is only US$12. Register online securely by clicking here.
Version History
See all the software from Deskfree Computing