Palm Speed / Afterburner OverClocking Settings
Several utilities greatly improve the palm's speed, including
I'm especially satisfied with how AB improves the speed of Franklin Covey applications. Thoughtfully configured, AB will also improve battery life!
AB has many bells and whistles and requires experimentation. Don't attempt to understand all the options before using it, just start with some Mhz changes. Read the documentation as time permits and adjust gradually over a period of a few weeks.
Do NOT arbitrarily maximize Mhz speed settings unless you know an application has a speed problem. Maxing sends battery life down the toilet. 90% of my apps are set in AB to 'default', and my default downgrades to a slower 14mhz ... so I get better battery life. Apps like calculator and many others can be set to 'slowest' to improve battery life. Slow productivity apps are set higher than default - my 'find' speed for example is set to 32mhz.
(there is a myth that Afterburner
can permanently damage your palm's CPU. Not true. AB is a solid
application, with a solid reputation. Requires a
hack manager.
Franklin Covey Applications
tasklist (PDTL) from Franklin Covey's FPS (Franklin Planner system)
needs good processor speed. A setting of 26mhz in
Afterburner on my PalmV yields good performance with
my 6 months of tasks.
Tasklist v3.2 is much worse than v3.1x. FC has not fixed V3.2 performance as of 9/2005 - about 5 years since the release was issued. Iif you don't like the speed of tasklist v3.2, then try loading v3.12 on your palm. V3.12 work fine under FPS 7.3.6 or 8.0. But first, make a backup copy of your v3.12(?) tasklist.prc before upgrading FPS, and make a backup copy of v3.2 before changing it back to v3.12.
With afterburner and takslist's speed set at max Mhz, the application is tolerable.
Several things affect the speed of tasklist on the palm: CPU/Mhz of the palm, total number of tasks synced to the palm, number of repeat tasks, version of tasklist (discussed above).
Here are some related tips, quoting Terry Oplinger (with permission):
The first question is, how many months of data do you have on the Palm? If it exceeds 30 days, then this is a common problem. I keep 6 months and it takes about 8 seconds to display the list.
Here's why... The program is designed to sort the list every time it is accessed. It shouldn't. If the data was stored in the Palm database by DATE and PRIORITY, then the sorting wouldn't be necessary. However it's the sorting that causes the problem.
My suggestion for FC was to rewrite this and change the database key data to avoid lengthy data lookups and long sort routines. The only time sorting is needed on the Palm, is when the user selects any of the "Move To Bottom" options. "
To summarize, in rougly decreasing order of effectivness:
Afterburner | Franklin Covey applications | more palm stuff
s/Wayne