To Format or NOT to Format ?

[Rayg]

Hi Guys



After a lot of help from this forum ( Thanks all who help newbies like me out!) I have got TomTom 2 working fine on my IPAQ 3970 with a 250Mb SD card. Just one question tho, When trying to find Citys/streets on the full UK map it is very slow ( I know its a HUGE map!). I have read some posts about formating the SD Card to improve the speed and also about downgrading the ROM to improve SD access and I was just wondering how usefaul that would be. My main questions are.



1

what format to use on the SD and can anyone recommend a good format tool that would run OK on the IPAQ 3970.



2

Does the Format/ROM downgarde make a significant enough speed change to warrant doing either or both.



Thank again for everyones help, I do find TomTom to be invaluable in my drving throughout the UK.



Best Regards



Ray G

[Parky]

Hi Ray,



I can only help you with part 1 of your question, reading through this forum, a lot of the people have suggested a utility called Storage Tools



I have not tried it myself, but may be woth a try. Maybe someone else who has used the program can give a better insight on its performance.



Regards Alan

[GFawkes]

Hi,

I also have a 3970 with a 128md SD card.



Like yourself, I was experiencing poor performance (searches/Map refreshes etc). I was running the later Rom and 16bit format on my SD card.



Formatting to 32 bit with 32k clusters and a defrag using storage tools made a small difference, but was still slow.



Reverting back to the earlier ROM made a huge difference. The searches and screen refreshes are now much faster.

[Rayg]

Thanks Parky and GFawkes. I took the plunge last night and downgraded my IPAQ ROM version and used storage tools to format my SD and BINGO. The speed diffeence on serching for towns /steets and sceen refeshes is just short of phenomenal. I did try the format first but is didnt make that much difference so the ROM change must have done the trick.



Thanks again guys for taking the time to reply, thanks to you I now have what I deem to be a very workable system.



best regards



ray g

[grahamwalker]

Hi Chaps,

Does anyone know whether the speed differential of SD cards with different ROM versions applies to the 3850 ROM too?



I'm on a 3850 and have moved from CF to SD card and its definately a lot slower. I was wondering whether to try downgrading my 3850 ROM or not. I'm on 1.15 currently...



Graham.

[DavidW]

The 'downgrade your ROM for better SD performance' only applies to the 3900 series and is related to sub-optimal SD drivers in the x.1x ROMs only. I would expect any future 3900 series ROMs to have this problem corrected.



If I remember rightly, SDIO support was first introduced with the x.1x ROMs, and it appears that these initial SDIO capable drivers did not perform as well with SD memory as the original SD memory only drivers.





The 3800 series has totally different SD hardware and SD drivers to the 3900 series. Though I've no direct experience with the 3800 series, my understanding is that the latest ROM provides the best SD compatibility and probably the best performance too.



However, the 3800 series SD slot is very slow because of the hardware design used - this cannot be solved by driver changes. My understanding is that the 3800 series uses a pretty slow single bit only SD interface (SD is capable of operating in a nibble mode, 4 bits at once). The 3800 series is not SDIO capable.



Because of the slow interface, I'd expect SD memory on the 3800 series will always be rather slower than a good CF card. This is different to the 3900 series where, if you get away from the faulty SD drivers in the x.1x ROMs, SD memory performance can be close to that of CF memory even if it's not quite as fast.







David

[Stevie]

I had slow response on the 3870 using SD card. Downgraded the rom and it was better. I would have said

TT2 with 3870/sd 256mb/latest rom but maybe I'm impatient.



I upgraded to a 3970 and a Silver Slider and used CF instead. Now I'm happier.



So if you are willing to risk a Rom upgrade (downgrade)it should help if you want to use SD cards.

But it may be worth waiting for the PC2003 upgrade you never know that might help.

[DavidW]

Supposedly HP have only mentioned Pocket PC 2003 upgrades for the 3900 series and 5400 series so far. It's possible that there will be an upgrade for other iPAQ series - we shouldn't have long to wait now to see.





It's unclear at this stage whether or not Pocket PC 2003 requires an XScale processor. I would have said XScale is not required, as many Pocket PC Phone Edition devices use processors with hardware support for phone functions built in (particularly TI's OMAP series). However, some have said that XScale will be required - if that is the case, then a 3800 series upgrade isn't possible.



A third option is that there's two versions of Pocket PC 2003, one of which contains either some XScale optimisations or is XScale only, and OEMs are left to prepare a ROM image for their devices using the appropriate version.





There's a lot of misinformation and rumour right now - another point of uncertainty is which version of Windows CE provides the basis of Pocket PC 2003. Some have said it's CE 3.0 as in previous versions of Pocket PC, others have said it's the latest CE 4.2. I suspect it's more likely to be CE 4.2 or at least a more recent version than CE 3.0, as different developer tools are required for Pocket PC 2003 specific code.





It will be much better when Pocket PC 2003 is released (supposedly Monday) and we will know the answers to these questions!





Assuming that an upgrade is made available for the 3970 (and I am pretty confident there will be one, as it's still widely available retail, even if manufacturing has now ended), I will order the upgrade as soon as I can , though I may hold back on installing for a while and let others take the pain of early adoption!



At least I'm fairly confident that the drivers I need will be made available as both my folding keyboard and my WL110 Wi-Fi card are both official HP/Compaq products.





Compaq have an excellent reputation at producing upgrades - they produced upgrades for both the 3100 and 3600 series iPAQs when Pocket PC 2002 launched.



This time, there's potentially many more upgrades needed - 3100 series, 3600 series, 3700 series, 3800 series non-Bluetooth, 3800 series Bluetooth, 3900 series non-Bluetooth, 3900 series Bluetooth, 545x and 1910. Compaq are also now part of the new HP, though I think their users will be disappointed if the policy is much different this time, unless it's technically impossible to produce a Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for a particular series.



It's unclear whether 16MB ROM devices will be able to be upgraded to Pocket PC 2003. There's also a consideration that HP may decide it's not be worth producing a Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for some long discontinued iPAQs.



There is concern from some that a Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for the 1910 may prove tricky (the 1910 expands the OS from its NAND flash into RAM, and runs it from RAM - this is why the 1910 has only a certain amount of usable RAM).





Again, only time will tell what is released and how we have to order the upgrade if we want it.



One lesson to be learnt from the Pocket PC 2002 upgrade is that Compaq discontinued availability outside the US after a while. It's would therefore seem a good idea to get your order in as soon as possible; this being particularly important any recent purchasers who may be entitled to a free upgrade as the free offer is probably for a limited time only.







David

[Dave]

From the information we have (thanks to Duncan), we believe there will be support for PPC2003 on 3800 series iPAQ's, we don't know if that will be straight away, or a little later, or how much of the extra utils you'll lose.   Personally I hope 2003 will be available. The only thing worrying me is will it cause issues with changing the way the serial number works for activation ?



There is also a lot of concern going around about a lot of applications may not work, and may need recompiling under PPC2003, but we had this sort of rumours under PPC2002 and the majority of apps were okay.

We see you’re using an ad-blocker. We’re fine with that and won’t stop you visiting the site.
Have you considered making a donation towards website running costs?.
Or you could disable your ad-blocker for this site. We think you’ll find our adverts are not overbearing!