This problem has reared its head a few times throughout my ownership of my Saga. I've had my Saga since the week it was released, and I'm using same Saga that was originally shipped to me.

I guess my problem doesn't really lie on "running" the programs off the SD, because programs run fine from it. It's just what happens after the screen goes off and I hit the power button on top to turn the phone back on... then boom! it crashes.

I noticed this at first back in March with a small program I wrote to track setlists while at a concert. (SetLists2Go) I was on my way to see Phish in Hampton, VA and was playing with my app in the airport. Showed it to another person at the airport, then forgot about it. Then when I came back to my phone 10 minutes later, as soon as I turned the phone on, the app crashed. I tried to recreate it, but wasn't able to (I never turned the phone's screen off!).. BUT..

Then I installed AIM on my SD card -- trying to kill some time at the airport. Was talking to a buddy.. phone screen turned off.. when I turned it back on -- AIM crashed. A little testing with my app and I was able to recreate the problem... programs crashed when the screen wakes up when running from the SD card.

I put both these apps in main memory and they worked fine for the rest of the weekend.

Anyway, I thought the issue initally could have been because I had a VERY cheap-o no-name brand SD card. (I think I took my 4gb Sandisk to use in my Nintendo DS..lol) So I went out and bought a Class 6 card. Put only data on it, really, until a few weeks ago.

I installed my Garmin GPS software on it. Now, I have no other option on where to install this software, as it's hundreds of MB.. so we get in the car and set our destination and go.. I had long since forgotten about the crashing problem and had thought I may have fixed it with the high-end card.

Wrong. When I turned the screen back on on my Saga CRASH goes Garmin Mobile XT. Fortunally I pulled over into a parking lot, reset my phone and my destination and told my girlfriend to "continuously move your finger over the mouse" so the screen never went to sleep and we made it to where we needed to go.

Holy crap.. sorry for the novel. Anyone else see this kind of behavior when running stuff from the card?

Yes. I see this on my i760. Has happened with 2 separate cards. After some experimentation I decided not to install any applications to the SD that I would need to leave sitting in the background - I had exactly the same issue.

There must be something in the O/S that is failing to maintain context with the removable media when it shuts down. Considering the fact that you're seeing this on your device which isn't of the same model my guess is we're looking at an O/S bug here. Evidently the O/S puts the SD card to "sleep" and something low-level is tossing a memory-access exception that isn't being handled correctly. They really ought to fix that.

-Max

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General Aviation is not the stepchild of modern aviation, it is it's father.

exactly- its a KNOWN issue with Winmo.

Basically when the device goes to sleep it shuts down the connection to the Sd card to save energy. But like everything else winmo does it screws up priorities at wakeup (same way the lock frequently doesn't work immediatley on wake).

the problem comes from calls to the card before the connection has been brought back up.

Mostly it happens with programs that run in the background (does aim keep you alive and listening in the background?) as they might get called to do something before the card is awake.

the work aorund is to not install anything to the card that might try to run on it's own. Personally i install NOTHING on the card except if at all possible. If there are too many things to install so you need to put some onthe card make sure they are things that only you will run by yourself and wont hang around in the background. Games are usually safe as an example.

If you poke around on the net there are some registry settings to tweak that can shorten the delay but they dont fix everything.

There must be a setting somewhere that can fix it, or at least make it bearable -- I had this same Garmin GPS software running flawlessly on my WM6.0 HTC Touch and my WM5 (Smartphone) Moto Q.

Could it be 6.1 specific?

I'm pretty sure it has existed in every version of WM since time began.

I seem to recall there is a reg edit (that maybe was different on the touch) that can adjust how long the OS delays before it calls the card. I'm not sure if you want to set the registry valie to wait longer (and let the card come back online) or shorter (becasue it is what is slowing down the card from coming alive). If you start fiddling with the reg value then different cards might matter (some may take longer than others)- but i'm really no expert.

you would need to google- i dont have a clue where to find the info- sorry

i couldnt find anythign overt for you on google.

check out this thread here though if you dont mind spending some effort.
http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/ppc-6...re-stable.html

there's a lot of talk about reg edits to fix SD card problems. Not sure at all wher to aim you inside it.

Yup, that's exactly what I do. I only install games there - or anything I might always exit from when I'm finished. Nothing that needs to stay running. Since I reconfigured with that in mind I've had no crashes at all.

-Max

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General Aviation is not the stepchild of modern aviation, it is it's father.

If you relocate your opera cache and messaging cache to the SD card, as well as store your photos/videos on the card, you'll have plenty of room on the phone itself to install programs. The regedits for the sd card mount/unmount may help, but it doesn't solve the problem. You can install google maps and other big, non-background apps to the card as well.

If your phone was a desktop computer (not too far off...), you wouldn't install MS office or outlook or (insert favorite software here) to a sd card on a card reader would you? These phones are much more little computers than anything else, engineered and coded for by the same folks using the same programming languages.

Good points myphoneisblue
I left that out- the way I make room is putting all the "data" like docs, vids, and photos on the card. I'm actually greedy and eave my browser cache on the device as I hope it speeds it up a tiny bit...

also- I think WM is WAY WAY too much like windows desktop- it's almost like they ported it over rather than started from scratch and that's the casue of half the issues. Biggest example is the wakeup behavior. If you wake a vista machine that went to sleep you see the first thing it does is says "locking the pc" or something. The desktop version doesn't lock before it goes to bed. But the machines are fast enough to lock everything down instantly on wake. Same thing happens to us- but these handheld devices dont have enough stones to quickly lock things down so have the time you can get several button presses (which can lead to a pocket dial) well before the lock gets around to kicking in.

They should have built the lock from scrath to get triggered on these things BEFORE sleep. And to stay locked at wake

My biggest issue now is my Garmin Mobile XT software -- unfortunately its size (100s of MB with maps) demands it be installed on the SD card. Bummer. I'll do some more poking around. Thanks for everyone's input...

can't you install the program to the device but put the map data directory on the card? I dont currently have a gps program installed but on past devices I've had tomtom and mapopolis and both of those would allow an install to the device with the maps on the card.