On 9/19/06, Kimmo Hämäläinen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yes, it would need to be reproducible in several different devices. The guy here that tried to reproduce it currently thinks that Siarhei's unit is broken.
Yes, I also think that the probability of my device being broken is quite high. A certain (small) fraction of other Nokia 770 owners are probably having the same problem. Does it make the device completely useless? Of course no, my device works almost fine, it only crashes and reboots sometimes, I also has filesystem corruption several times (now even switched mmc filesystem to ext3, don't know if it would help much though). So the device can be surely used as a book reader, internet browser and serve other tasks. Other (small) fraction of users who got 'white screen of death' were surely less lucky. What can be done about this if the defective memory problem gets confirmed. I see three possible ways: 1. 'Ignorance is a bliss' - just do nothing, those who don't know about the problem will not worry about it :) The device will just crash or reboot occasionally, some more unlucky users having more annoying crashes will complain in the forums providing some bad PR. 2. Distribute some diagnostics software that will help to identify memory problems and repair/replace defective units, that will have some expences, but will improve overall reliability and reduce the number of negative publicity. 3. Add some (un)official support for working around bad memory regions using technology something similar to BadRAM, in this case most of such units will be completely usable. In general, bad memory problem is quite common for x86 pc's, but there is an excellent tool for memory diagnostics - memtest86. It helped me quite a number of times, also I always advice everyone having stability issues to run it first. I don't know how the reliability of memory chips used in embedded devices compares to the reliability of memory from normal desktop computers, but bad memory seems to be one of the most frequently encountered hardware problems.
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