Fortunately, viruses have not been a significant problem for the Pocket PC. However, the Windows Mobile Pocket PC operating system does not do a good job keeping itself clean. That is, the effect of temporary files, bad registry entries, incomplete uninstalls, and a host of other maladies accumulate over time. At the least that means wasted space. Worse, the Pocket PC can become slow and unstable and require a soft reset. You could even be forced to hard reboot and lose all your data.
In general it is a good idea to install only the software that you might need and remove what you never use. The Pocket PC operating system was designed so that a large number of properly written programs can co-exist. However, there are a huge number of possible installations and no one can know for sure how programs will react with one another. A Pocket PC with a lot of third-party programs installed can become less reliable and more unstable due to application incompatibility and exhaustion of system resources.
Software solutions
I tested four third-party solutions that were designed to help keep the Pocket PC lean and mean: Space Reclaimer (http://www.valksoft.com), MemMaid (http://www.handango.com), SKTools (http://s-k-tools.com), and Pocket Mechanic (http://www.antontomov.com). Basic maintenance is the sole purpose of Space Reclaimer (Fig. 1), which can be set to run automatically upon soft reboot. The other three products provide this basic functionality plus additional utilities that allow you to look at the data on your Pocket PC or storage cards in a variety of useful ways. MemMaid and SkTools do an in-depth analysis of internal storage and memory. Pocket Mechanic (Fig. 2), while also examining memory, features a number of utilities for defragmenting, formatting, and analyzing files on storage cards. I strongly recommend using at least one of the four.
Fig. 1: Space Reclaimer can be set so it automatically runs on reboot
Fig. 2: Pocket Mechanic provides many options for inspecting and cleaning up the Pocket PC.
Another related tool is Kilmist Storage Analazer (http://www.kilmist.com). This software does not clean up your Pocket PC per se, but it lets you analyze files stored internally and on memory cards, displaying its analysis through graphs and in various list views. So, for example, your can view all music WMA files, list files from largest to smallest, or see duplicate files. You can use the results to clean up and better organize you Pocket PC files.
Figs. 3-4. Kilmst Storage Analyzer lets you examine and display all your Pocket PC files in a variety of ways.
The under-utilized Pocket PC
Vassili Philippov of Spb Software House in a recent e-mail suggested that 90% of Pocket PC users don't use third party software. That seemed pretty high. However, Vassili's concern was brought home to me when a few days later, I attended a conference for magazine publishers. I was pleasantly surprised to learn how many of them used Pocket PCs (especially Phone Editions).
However, upon questioning them, Vassili's thesis of the underutilized Pocket PC seemed to hold. Few had installed third party software or knew of the Pocket PCs built-in capabilities. In fact several asked me about the iPOD, not realizing they already had the capacity to listen to music and even play video. Most were using their Pocket PC for one function, normally e-mail or PIM synchronization, and in the case of a pilot a single vertical application.
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