I recently ordered from ExtremePDA.com a new Krusell case for my HTC Hermes PDA Phone, after the old case I bought from Cingular (which they apparently no longer sell, at least not on-line, but which closely resembled this one) with the phone wore out.

When the new case arrived, I found that when I used the spring clip included with the case, it fell off my belt several times per day. The old case pretty much never fell off, so this was definitely a step in the wrong direction. After it fell off and I didn’t notice it was gone for an hour (fortunately this happened when I was at home rather than in transit), I decided I really needed to do something about it, so I emailed ExtremePDA and asked which Krusell clip I could buy (Krusell cases have interchangeable clips) that wouldn’t allow the case to fall off like the spring clip.

ExtremePDA responded quickly and told me not to bother buying another clip — they’d send me the right one for free. True to their word, a few days later I received a package from them with two clips in it. I’ve been using one of them since then, and the case hasn’t fallen off my belt once.

ExtremePDA was prompt and responsive and solved my problem without nickel-and-diming me. They clearly understand what customer service is all about. For that, I will surely give them more business in the future should the opportunity arise, and I encourage you to do the same!

To add insult to injury, when I turned on the backlight of the phone four hours later and looked at the time in the corner of the screen, it was still an hour off… I had to reset the phone to correct it.

The most common recommendation I found on the Web and in the microsoft.public.pocketpc newsgroup for getting rid of the ghost alarms was to perform a hard reset on the device, i.e., to clear all memory and restore the device to its factory default settings. This is unacceptable to me since it takes a significant amount of time for me to reinstall all my applications and restore all of my configuration settings each time I have to do this, so I keep searching for other solutions.

I finally discovered that Windows Mobile has a “notifications queue” independent of individual applications that generate notifications, and that sometimes periodic notifications get stuck in this queue even when they have been “disowned” by the applications that originally generated them

I found two tools that can fix this problem. One of them, MemMaid, can be configured to run automatically on a daily basis to clean up problems with the notifications queue, and is therefore probably the right tool to use if this problem recurs for you on a regular basis. The other tool, SKTools, comes with a whole bunch of other tools for cleaning up, optimizing and tweaking the behavior of Windows Mobile, so it’s probably a better bargain if you don’t need to clean your notifications queue automatically on a regular basis.

I must say that I think it’s unfortunate that people have to pay money for tools to fix problems caused by bugs in Microsoft code. Microsoft should provide tools to do this for free, or they should fix the darn bugs.

While digging through the registry on the phone in an effort to fix a different issue, a discovered how to turn off the animation and sound, so I thought I’d share this information in case it might be useful to other people.

Using a Windows Mobile registry editor such as Mobile Registry Editor (free; google for it), Resco Explorer (commercial), or SKTools (commercial), find the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\HTC\StartupAnimation and change the value Enabled from 1 to 0.

There is a value Volumn in the same registry key which I thought might be useful for changing the volume of the sound, but I tried various settings for it with no effect.