Devman 2.21 s80 v2
There are few things in life guaranteed to elicit agreement from just about everyone. The first is, of course, that there's an awful lot of rubbish on television these days. The second is that the Nokia 9210 communicator is memory-challenged, to say the least.
Of the 9210's 8MB of 'execution memory', only around 2.5MB is actually available for all your running programs, which isn't really enough once you start to get ambitious. The 9210i model improved things slightly but it's still common to find the Symbian operating system closing Messaging, Calendar and Contacts down automatically in a desperate bid to free up some RAM.
Now, if I said that for $9 you could add up to half a Megabyte of free execution memory to your communicator, you'd bite my hand off, right? Read on...
DevMan (a development of same chap's own freeware Memory Monitor) is designed to do everything possible to ease these memory problems. At its simplest, it presents a list of running applications and how much RAM each is using. At the bottom-right of the display is the all-important 'Free Ram' figure and it's this you should keep your eye on each day.
As programs are launched and closed, they inevitably leave behind a bit of a mess in RAM. DevMan's 'Compress Heaps' command button addresses this to some extent, optimising the 9210's memory and increasing the reported 'Free Ram'. And to save wearing your finger out, you can turn on auto compression (e.g. every hour) or even just when you open the 9210's case.
This isn't the whole story, of course, because bugs in the Symbian operating system and in third party applications can sometimes cause chunks of memory to be temporarily 'lost' completely. Which is when you reach for the battery clip, to reset the device. But here DevMan can help out again, with a convenient reset command on its menu. If nothing else, this should save wear and tear on the battery catch!
A 'Close all programs' command is a quick way to safely shut everything down, perhaps in preparation for a quick game of Doom. And there are other 'Spy' functions that are best avoided unless you're a programmer and really interested in the goings on inside the operating system... There's also a handy hot-key ('Ctrl'-'Tab', by default) to bring DevMan to the foreground.
You'll be surprised how quickly you come to depend on DevMan. Even if you don't use its application lists and management, you can rest easy, knowing that every last byte of RAM is being used as efficiently as possible. And that has to be very good news indeed
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