Tag Archives: reboots

Blackberry out of memory again

Last night the blackberry started to act all sluggish again and lock up at random. Sure enough, the memory was down to zero bytes. Unfortunately I’ve already gone through the suggested options of reducing the amount of email stored on the device, calendar entries, deleting the help file etc. I did delete the log by pressing alt LGLG and this gave me a bit of memory to allow me to reboot. After the reboot I had 3.39mb of free space. Not a lot considering it comes with 64mb and has a 2gb SD card attached. Why RIM were so shortsighted to force apps to run from memory only I don’t know but I am sure there is a technical reason.  This was also one of my pet peeves with the Windows Mobile and Palm devices – why can’t programs run from removable devices?

Anyway, after about an hour I checked the free memory on the phone again – it had gone down to 2.4mb free. I hadn’t used the phone at all – the free memory had been eaten up by mail that had come in on the phone or something else.  The weird thing is that deleting the new email made hardly any difference to the size of the free memory available.

This morning I am down to 1.09mb but I have tried installing and removing a couple of apps and checked gmail. The one app I did download was softreset that allows me to quickly reset the phone – it does the equivalent of pulling the battery out without the hassle of removing the cover and the battery. I’ve been reluctant to constantly remove the battery as this often leads to loose fitting batteries (and I shouldn’t really have to do it!)  The icon for softreset looks like a blue screen of death which is rather amusing. After my reboot this morning I had 3.6mb available which is weird considering I have one more app than I did yesterday and I have overnight email downloaded. It does look like I have a memory leak somewhere though.

Blackberry reboot solution.

RIM have come up with a fix for the issue of the 8703e reboots. A couple of our guys have installed it and haven’t had any more problems with them rebooting so it looks good.
The handheld OS update (4.2.x) for the 8703 has been posted publicly on the RIM site
The update was released to fix reboots in several markets (Richmond, Chicago, Raleigh, Honolulu, Cleveland, Columbus OH, Norfolk, Knoxville) and will need to be downloaded to a PC and loaded with desktop manager (v3.2 or better suggested). If on a BES, the customer will need to do a new enterprise activation after update.
In addition 4.2 software supports WAV files. The first point of contact for support is Blackberry care 877-654-9111.