My Blackberry-torch became nearly unusable a little while ago. I was getting the spinning clock on almost every action and I would get “Uncaught exception” errors often. Even the touchscreen stopped working at one point. The Torch is running smoothly now and I thought I would share the process in case others had the same experience.
Step 1: Memory Health Check
If your Torch is running sluggishly, you could be experiencing a memory leak. In BlackBerry 6, it’s easy to figure this out. Just head over to:
Options > Device > Application Management > Memory
Check what apps are taking up the most space. The top of the list will be BlackBerry 6, Browser and Messages. Obviously, you don’t want to delete any of these, but there may be a beta app at the top of this list that’s taking up a lot of memory. If so, you may want to update it or completely remove it. Be sure to cycle through the time periods to by clicking under the Memory title and selecting “Max This Week”. You can also check “Application Storage” to make sure you have a proper amount of memory available.
Step 2: Operating System
It’s important to know whether you have the latest OS as well. To check, go to:
Options > Device > About Device Versions
Look beside where it says 6.0 Bundle and in brackets it will have your OS version (6.0.0.XXX). You can always check BlackBerryOS.com and see what they’re showing in terms of latest official OS builds. If you don’t have the latest official OS, we’ll have to upgrade your device.
Once you’ve downloaded the latest OS, install it by double-clicking the .exe file. After clicking “next” a bunch and avoiding the tens of pages of lawyer jargon, you’ll eventually hit “finish” and the OS will be loaded on your computer. To install it, you’ll want to use the BlackBerry Swiss Army Knife Application. It’s one of the easiest ways to update your OS and can be downloaded at bbsak.org. This is a PC app and if you have a Mac, you’ll have to use a dual boot system to run the app. We recommend using Bootcamp that comes with Snow Leopard. If you don’t have the latest version of Mac OS, you could use VMWare, which doesn’t run as smoothly.
Once you run BBSAK the steps are really obvious. You’ll want to select “Load New OS” and follow the steps. Also, be sure to donate because it’s an awesome piece of software and definitely worth supporting the community.
Now is also a great time to clean up your apps. During the update process, you’ll be asked which apps you want to keep on your device, and which you want to remove. I like to go through the apps like in Half Baked when Scarface quit his job. After downloading apps constantly, I probably only keep about 1 in 5 when I choose to go through them all.
The update process is a huge pain in the ass. RIM needs to realize that nobody wants to spend upwards of an hour updating their software and dealing with multiple carrier builds and different desktop operating systems. Hopefully with the QNX OS, we’ll have 1 OS for every carrier and when it gets updated, all devices can install it on either Windows or Mac in less than 15 minutes. Is that too much to ask?
Hopefully your Torch is back up to speed. If not, there are a ton of helpful resources on this site and many others.
feel free to leave a comment on this post if you’re still having problems and we’ll try and help.
Info@mikiguru.com