Um, I seem to forget where my memory went...

[Gary Garland]

Hi Gang!
I recently watched my iPAQ 3975's 64 meg of RAM drop to 3 meg available - and that's with installing virtually everything to SD card, and installing at most 5 meg of stuff into RAM. The 3 meg was even after soft resets.
I contacted a Microsoft MVP who had experienced similar problems, and if you want to know what happened, how to avoid it, and how to fix it, well, you'll just have to hit the comment button, won'tcha?

[Gary Garland]

Hah! Suckered you into reading this. Naw, here's the deal:
I set activesync (version 3.6, but same problem with 3.7) to syncronize mail with my desktop. even though i had "last 5 days only" selected, and "limit to 100 lines" well, activesync doesn't work the way you'd think.
sure, syncing today would give me all my e-mail messages from july 26 through today, the 31st - but it would LEAVE all my prior syncs as well - so I had some 4,000 messages from roughly March on the iPAQ - castrating my RAM. Sure, I had attachments going to SD card, but the damage was done.
I had experienced this in the past (you'd think I'd learn). And of course, if you have inbox set to sync, deleting an e-mail on the PPC deletes it from your desktop.
Solution?
Shrug your shoulders, say RAM is far more important to me than my emails (important e-mails can be copied into notepad and saved anyway), and then do a voodoo chant. After 4 hours, de-select "sync inbox" from activesync, and then go through the long, laborous process of deleting your activesync e-mails from your Pocket PC. This will likely take HOURS - there is no provision to select all your e-mail (rotten microsoft) so you'll have to highlight as many e-mails as you can tolerate (by scrolling off the screen), and then when they're highlighted, you have to hold down the stylus until the red circle SLOWLY and sluggishly appears, then choose delete - and then wait, literally for minutes at a time. you may have to occasionally tap the screen to keep the ppc from shutting off - ugh - finally, you'll have deleted that batch. after about 30 minutes last night, i managed to knock out about 1,000 of my e-mails - leaving close to 3,000 left. at least after I now have about 32 meg of ram available.
i also did this for the windows/messenging folder - i'm not sure if deleting the e-mails would have done that for me - so i would recommend deleting the e-mails, then looking for other things, like that messenging folder, and also checking to make sure you deleted your inbox attachments (which you may have in storage).
well, hope this helps somebody - and i hope microsoft improves this in the future - i LOVE having my last week or so of mail (i can settle for 5 days) but I DON'T need 60 meg of mail griding my ipaq to a halt.

[freitasm]

I have my INBOX Sync set to all. But I manage my inbox in a way that only my latest 20 or 30 e-mails are there. Anything that is done is moved to an archive folder, or deleted. I do sync other folders as well, but they're just a inbox sorted by subject - Inbox for Geekzone, Inbox for Personal, Inbox for Work...
I've seen users with 8000 e-mails in the inbox! The person never delete anything because she didn't know how to move to other folders. Lucky she didn't have a Pocket PC too :P
Have a look here: http://www.goodexperience.com/reports/e-mail for some good suggestions. I think I'll post an article about this...

[evert]

Hi!
Well, Gary... You might wanna check out the combo I use... When I delete an email from my desktop-Inbox, it automagically also gets removed from my PDA-Inbox. This makes cleaning out the PDA-Inbox a breeze... 8)