Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Hello,

This is my first post here so I hope I'm in the right spot :) I figured this would be the best place to ask this kind of a question.

My N900 was just delivered about 2 hours ago. All I've done is installed the Sim Card, Battery, Charged it, and Upgraded the Maemos 5 option it gave me to upgrade. I chose a different (factory-provided) theme and background image. I also installed the Facebook widget but that was later on and the problem was occurring from the get-go.

Basically, my N900 is running *extremely* slow. For example, when I try to just slide over from desktop to desktop, it halts half-way through the scrolling/animation with some glitchy looking graphics and doesn't even redraw until I touch it. When I'm scrolling through the Apps Manager, I have the same problem. It's as if this thing is having a really tough time drawing and/or updating the graphics buffer. I don't really understand what's going on so it's hard to explain.

The command line runs flawlessly though -- once I can actually pull it up. So I'm not sure if it's a CPU issue as much as it is a memory or even a graphics issue.

Running top, I see that my CPU is sitting at 96% idle. It looks like 223MB of memory is used and 21MB of memory is free (rounding). That feels excessively high to just be sitting idle with only the command line running so I assume that it's not an accurate indicator of memory usage.

I have bluetooth disabled. I am connected to a Wifi(G) network so that might explain a little bit of a problem. I have my SIM card in but had AT&T put a block on my data so I don't think it's doing a whole lot there. The thing that's using the most memory is X which is only taking up 6% of my memory.

I read another post and kind of google'd around for a bit but it seems like other people's problems are with mutitasking. My problem is just using the standard interface with practically nothing running.

If anyone has any suggestions on what might be going on or what I should do, I'd be happy to hear them.

Thanks a lot!
-Kurtis

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Ok. I understood your problem. This has happened a couple of times to me alsowhen I had updated to the latestfirmware but without having the latest emmc. In Plain words, uhave managed to update one such component and thesecond one is not yet done. If you wanna fix this up, I'dsuggest you flash your device to the latest firmware as per the Wiki Guide rather than using the SSU.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_firmware

EDIT: APOLOGIES. SRY FOR THE ABOVE BUT I DINT READ THAT IT IS AT&T LOCKED. PLS SOMEONE ELSE ASSIST HIM WITH GETTIN THE IMAGES. AGAIN, DO NOT FOLLOW THE GUIDE UNLESS SOMEONE CONFIRMS IMAGES OF AT&T's AVAILIBILITY.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Thank you :) I'll give that a shot. I just went to change my background image and the whole phone just shut off instantly. Hopefully there's nothing wrong with the hardware!

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

If your phone is AT&T Locked, do not do so unless someone using AT&T contract phone can confirm that the same images will work.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Since when does AT&T sell the N900?

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

I Have no friggin idea and so.... I Panicked :p I Dint realise it might just be a sim.... oh my, now i feel stupid. LoL

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

mine does the same thing sometimes after turning it on. i think its the trackers and all other background processes that slow it down. give it some time and reboot it and it think it will perform just fine. ;)

PS. mine is clocked to 1100Mhz so it might not be a hardware issue.
sry for my insufficient english,
PSPS. welcome to the forum! its always nice to see our community gains new members. i hope we here can help you with any problems you might encounter.

greetings from finland.

Edit: fixed lots of typos.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

haha no worries :) I appreciate the concern. Yeah, I just took the sim out of my old phone and put it into this one.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Tests: Disable Wifi-network and Wifi-searches, disable all repositorys in HAM, boot w/o SIM or SD-card, Flight/offlinemode, GSM connection only etc.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Thanks a lot! I'll definitely be coming back more often. I've been waiting to be able to buy this phone for like a year now so I'm pretty excited.

I was waiting for the firmware to download when I read your suggestion on giving it time and just rebooting it. I already had it shut down. I went ahead and started it up just to see if there's any difference. It feels like it's running a lot better already and I haven't done anything except turning it off for might a little bit. I think I'm going to wait to flash this phone and see if it just keeps working like normal. Thanks a lot for that suggestion! You might have saved me a lot of time and a headache, haha.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

flashing isn't so hard afterall but it definetly takes its time. first time i ever flashed, i forgot(and dind't know) to put the firmware images to the same folder as flasher tool. :D i think flashing is the last option if (and when) you have fooled around with your phone settings and gotten to that point there is no other thing to do than flash. ;)

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

If you got it direct from Nokia or a store, reflashing isn't important. If you got it second hand, you may be better off just reflashing anyway, to start from a good/known point. The previous owner may have installed and uninstalled things and left odd settings.

The first 10 to 15 minutes after a flash install or initial turn-on, it may be a little laggy, since it's doing one-time setup things (tracker, etc). It may also be doing lots of indexing if you put a microSD card in too, scanning it for media, etc.

You may want to look at some of the "best of" or "must have" app threads here to get an idea of some of the tweaks and tuning you can do. There's quite a lot to tweak, and doing that out of the gate is usually best. (Since if you screw it up and need to reflash, you're not losing months or years of data/config, etc.)

Welcome to the N900!

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Hey Congrats on te reboot fix. :) And yes, flashing might be a hedache in the start but then later you realise it is fun. Sry for jumping directly on the flashing part but as far as I know, when I purchased my new phone, I had this issue, snappy usage even after upgrading while everyone said it is much more smoother. Enjoy Maemoing :p

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

The N900 is supposed to be a very fast device, even without overclocking.

I recently received a new unit as my old one had a few warranty-covered problems they were unable to fix. For my luck it came pre-installed with PR1.3, so I'm probably one of the few that have a vanilla PR1.3 image installed. The device is lightning fast, browser works faster than ever, apps launch in about 2/3 the time they did on my previous unit. The previous unit was OC'd for the entire time it's been possible with easy instructions.

So here's my point: don't overclock unless you're interested in the PlayStation emulators and want some extra kick to play those games. Reinstall the image (flash your device) and you'll be fine. If you want to spice up your device, find the discussion on "Custom transitions". This will make your device seem even faster.

The key to a fast N900 is simply the "purest" install you can muster.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Try to overclock your phone up to 950Mhz (with kernel power) and also install "Theme customizer" (with fast transitions).

Those are the two things I do as soon as I reflash my phone.

With stock kernel, it does feel slow, but after the two updates mentionned above, my phone feels so much faster.

Good luck.
NB : also try swappolube, it doesn't hurt.

Reno

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Why are you all ignoring the fact that his CPU is at a constant 90+ % load?

What is the most consuming process when you run top, kurtis?
I bet it's "browserd" - which means you installed a buggy/fauly application.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

because the cpu isnt at 96% anymore after rebooting ;) (see last post on page 1)

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

You guys are so helpful! Thanks a lot. I may go ahead and give it a fresh format (reflash) before I setup and customize too much.

It's been just as fast as everyone has said. I might give the overclocking a try but I'll wait a bit until I'm ready to be a power user. The battery dies on me pretty quickly considering it's a brand new phone w/ a brand new battery.

My only gripe so far is that I'm having trouble installing and using some apps. For example, I installed Quake 2. But it would just start and then stop (drop to the desktop) without any real error message. It wasn't until I tried to run it from the command line that I realized it needed the data files.

Also, I tried to install OpenDune, but it got most way through the install and then said "Unable to Install". This wasn't such a big deal except that when I went to install it again, it wasn't available in my App-List.

It's also been temperamental in downloading any new apps -- it will just say downloading but the bar doesn't move at all. I've tried restarting the phone and my internet connection but didn't get anywhere. I don't know if this is a problem with my phone or perhaps the servers. I have a good amount of experience with Debian so if it uses the aptitude package manager for these apps, I'll try to run or find a local mirror.

Otherwise, this device is well worth the money and it's one of the sweetest toys I've ever bought, haha. I never used any apps except for the basic functions when I had my iPhone for a year but I've been playing with this thing non-stop and still have barely scratched the surface. I love it :)

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Just a quick reply about the battery,
remove widgets like weather forecast or facebook (the ones that refresh often). These are battery hungry.
I get 2 days worth of battery without those, even with overclocking.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

Oh and about the download stopping without notice, check your internet connection setting, under Advanced Settings.
Make sur to set Power Saving to either intermediate or OFF.
Most routers do not support Power Saving and what happen's is that your connection gets dropped from time to time. That's enough to screw up a download in progress.

Re: Brand new N900 extremely slow
 

That helped tremendously. Thanks!