When I first received my new phone and reviewed the HTC Mogul, I found that the frequency that the device crashed was “pretty annoying”. Well I had loaded it up with lots of apps that ran in the background, some apps I didn’t need that uncleanly uninstalled (and has registry item missing messages), some items that turned on whenever a data connection was available, etc. The thing was a hog. I’m sure it consumed the full amount of RAM available on boot.

Eventually the device came to crash once a day or more. Then the phonepocalypse happened, while I was on a road trip with some buddies, the phone decided to not turn on at all. Soft reset after soft reset, it would get to the BIOS screen, then never proceed to the WM6.1 loading screen. I really thought that the device was fried. Fortunately, I hard reset the device (meaning erase all data and restore to factory defaults, and it was able to boot again. All was not lost. (All data especially wasn’t lost thanks to dashwire, man that app is rad for Windows Mobile devices.)

So I decided to give DCD’s trimmed mogul ROM a try. Following the instructions the entire install took less than an hour. All of the files that were required for the install are available from his repository of files, of course. From a software fully updated (from HTC.com) factory reset device, I installed NueSPL 3.47 by putting it on my MicroSD card and running it. I then ran “dcd_titan_3.3.4.exe” from my computer with Mogul attached via USB. It took care of the rest. Once the install process finished, I installed “dcd Sprint Carrier 20081020.cab” from my MicroSD card by putting it on there, installing it, then going to Settings => Connections => Update PRI on the phone, which allowed it to provision the device to be on the Sprint network.

All is now well, it has been about a week without needing to do a software reset, and without crashing. I have been avoiding some obvious culprits as I previously noted:
* too much ram utilized (The trimmed rom really helps here.)
* not using the slide out keyboard (I found that this was causing the crash many times. No idea why.)
* letting the battery get too low (A fresh install really helps here.)

I noticed that the wifi still doesn’t work, so that is definitely a defect with this particular phone, not the model as a whole.

So in summary, for the low amount of RAM on the HTC Mogul, a slimmed down custom ROM is absolutely the way to go to make it stable.

Found a pretty good deal on a Lamar Cruiser 163cm Snowboard with M3 bindings and Airwalk size 14 boots (on flickr). Since I’m going snowboarding next week and I hate how pricey they are to rent, I figure that this will get some once-a-year use out of me for the rest of my life. Or then again, maybe I will use them next week, and never again.

What is it with this month?

I’ve seen this Globally Recognized AVATAR thing popping up all over the place, and the more I see it, the better an idea I realize it is. So I enabled it on my site and built it into my theme. Now you just have to associate an image with your email address on gravatar.com if you haven’t already, and we should see some avatars soon.

Bought a 2GB MicroSD card for my Sprint HTC Mogul, with hopes to install DCD’s stripped down WM 6.1 ROM, and eventually the Google Android work in progress. Hopefully to all wrap up by next week.