This isn't a complaint about the n900, i love the phone to pieces, more just asked for some advice. My device is running painfully slow at times, so much so that i'm missing phone calls on occassion, it's mainly the desktop thats slow, it really does grind and is completely non responsive at times. I think i've installed some crap in the past from extras-devel which has bodged it up.

I think the best course of action is for me to reflash my phone and start afresh, however will i lose all my pictures, music, messages and contacts if i do this? I really don't want to lose this, especially the contacts and messages.

What would be my best course of action with this? Where to start.

Does it still do this after rebooting? Some people have complained that their phone slows down after a couple of days, but a reboot fixes that.

If you do want to reflash and start afresh, you can use the Backup application to backup all your contacts & messages, etc. For contacts you can also do a full export from within the Contacts app (just to be sure). And the music/pictures can be copied across to the PC before you flash. Ideally, you shouldn't lose anything after backing up, reflashing, and restoring (this isn't quite the case yet, as some applications aren't adding their configuration files into the backup list).

For flashing instructions, see http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware

Go to X terminal and type 'top'
check if there is some process using lot of CPU time (>30%)
Maybe that will give a hint about offending process.

Check same after reboot

The widgets seem to be the problem.
See bug https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723

Hmm widgets would make sense, i have mediaplayer, dataplan, trasmitter on/off and 9 icon widgets (contacts, phone etc), it's always hildon desktop which grinds to a halt so it all ties in. I've run top hundred of times, always to find maybe 7% cpu use at most.

I heard that hildon desktop didn't reset after reboot? That you had to run another command to fully reset it as it keeps it's state? Rebooting the phone itself gives me about 5 mins performance bonus, but it gets back rather quickly.

Thanks for the info on flashing, i will sweat it out in this thread for a bit to see if anyone else has any less drastic answers if not flashing is the only option.

I too have seen similar. The system is especially bad whenever it is doing a fancy transition, like trying to display a menu, switch tasks, etc.

I've tried reboots and but it hasn't helped. I've checked top and I see nothing significant in it. Almost everything installed is from extras-testing with some of my own apps out of extras-devel.

I've got jabber, either skype or sip enabled, and occasionally The One Ring. I cannot remember if I've seen it since I've disabled some desktop widgets. I had calendar, RSS, some apps, data plan monitor, ip monitor, omweather, location, etc and removed a couple of them.