More good within hard reset

Update Nov 06: For more information about how to reset your Treo 650 and Treo 700 please read my latest post entitled Hard Reset, Data Protection & Privacy Tips Upgrading To The New Treo 680 From a Treo 650.

Until recently I was not a big fan of performing a hard reset on my Treo even after reading Jonathan's excellent post on this issue back in December "The good within hard reset". 

I have however now become a hard reset convert as most of my fears proved to be unfounded (but I still proceed with caution).  While Jonathan's detailed process remains absolutely correct to this day, his post was based on using a Treo 600 and I've recently discovered that there is another - somewhat unexplained - benefit to performing a hard reset on a Treo 650 (at least mine).

After having to go through my own hard reset recently (one of only three or four in my entire Treonauting lifetime) I found out that I had suddenly managed to free up an additional 2MB of memory with exactly the same applications reinstalled after my HotSync. 

At the time, I assumed that I must not have been paying proper attention and that my mind was probably making the whole thing up.  However, earlier today I performed yet another hard reset to clean up my Treo and I once again managed to free up the same 2MB of memory (from 4.6MB free to 6.6MB).

Clearly I am installing and uninstalling at least a couple of new evaluation applications on a daily basis and so my usage may not be 'normal' but I cannot imagine that I am the only Treonaut who might benefit from a memory improvement after a hard reset. 

If your own available free memory is reaching the upper limits (a buffer of 4MB is probably ideal even though I have worked with as little as 1MB) then perhaps you'll find similar joy in performing a hard reset (but as I mentioned just do a proper hotsync before and possibly also backup using a tool such as BackupBuddyVFS).

At the same time, I found out about something else that might prove of interest to PowerRun users (an essential and excellent Treo solution that allows you to move any application to your SD card and thus free up memory). 

Namely, after you perform a hard reset all of PowerRun's application shortcuts will be deleted.  Until now I thought that the only way to rebuild these shortcuts was to install each application individually again and recreate each shortcut because upon opening PowerRun there are no apps shown on the card.

However, I discovered that PowerRun does in fact have an option to 'Update Shortcuts' (below left) after these have been purposely or accidentally deleted from your handheld which will automatically restore all of these (below right) and your applications will run as smoothly as before the hard reset.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial about how to reset your Treo at palmOne's Support Knowledge Library.

Treonauts always look to run at full power...