Wish you could delete garbage like AT&T Mall or Shop Music. Things I won't ever use, but Cingular/AT&T has super glued into my Blackberry so that my kids can download stuff. Then I have to call and complain that a minor did the ordering ("please remove from my bill").

Thanks for the great sugestions, there are some new tools by Aerize that really help save memory too. Aerize Card Loader 2008 ( http://aerize.com/blackberry/software/loader/ ) and Aerize Optimizer 2008 ( http://aerize.com/blackberry/software/optimizer/ ) help a great deal.

Is there a performance difference by closing an app vs backspacing out of it?

tks

@ frc410, I find that closing and exiting applications rather then backspacing "minimizing" the apps does help out with your devices overall memory and performance. Some third party apps arent coded 100% and even maybe the bb's own apps might have slight memory leaks.

@ Tdavis, you can actually get rid of all those icon! Beware thought that a quick reset or pull of the battery and the icons get downloaded back once againg via the Network.

Simply go to OPTIONS --> ADVANCED OPTIONS --> SERVICE BOOKS --> and you see all those Media Mall - entrys? Those are the icons "Shortcuts" to the links to get you on Media Net to buy stuff. Menu and delete away.

This is a relly great article. I work for a major cell provider and if I had a dime fore everytime someone called and said my phone is freezing, powering off, or deleting my call logs and text messages I would be as rich as Bill Gates! May I suggest an article on the importance and usages on the BB Desk Top Mgr

I don't know about a performance hit, but I definitely DO see a drastic drain on the battery when I leave an application like GoogleMaps or Jive (IM client) running.

If I "backspace" out of them, they are still running and they chew up the battery in very little time. Whereas QUITting them saves precious battery power.

How can you tell if you're using a lot of memory? I have the "Status" page open on my BB- What if I calculate a percentage between "File Free" and "File Total"? ie, if File Free is 30% of File Total, you're likely to see reduced performance? Or am I completely off?

Hi Anonymous,

I actually wrote a follow-up to this story to answer that very question.

Check out "BlackBerry How To: Determine Memory Use, Avoid Performance Degradation."

Hope that helps.

AS

Thanks so much! This is fantastic info and clearing my memory cache fixed my browser problem ("a communication failure has occured. The server may be busy...")