As part of the general trend of human-to-machine intelligence outsourcing, the Poorhouse likes to take note of its ever-more failing memory and delegate tasks such as knowing what to do on an average day to PDA-esque technology. With even the most basic of mobile phones now having enough diary features to plan a space mission this generally works well. A day without 1000 reminders to "Get out of bed", "Have a shower", "Tie up shoelaces" and so on is probably a day wasted.

All goes well until the PDA/phone/whatever breaks. Unfortunately the Poorhouse's current smartphone which runs Windows Mobile 5 did break a bit - although quite subtly. Whilst you could still input appointments, tasks et al. it would always fail to actually remind you to do them. Wonderful.

Further investigation saw that the screen would come on at the appropriate time, but the absence of a buzz or ear-piercing howl meant that the event was generally ignored when the phone was in one of its usual default locations - down the back of the sofa, in the wrong coat and so on.

Uninstalling a few potentially interfering applications didn't help at all. Having recently loaded up a pile of nice applications to play with a hard reset was undesirable.

Further investigation led to the discovery of the Windows Mobile 5 notification queue. This is apparently a big queue (hence the name one imagines) of pending notifications including any tasks, appointments, alarms and other application-specific events that are to take place. It seems this queue can get corrupt or blocked...with symptoms including no reminders being show. Result!

Commonly recommended programs to deal with the queue include MemMaid or perhaps Pocket Mechanic. The idea with MemMaid at least is that you go through the queue and look for anything with a dodgy looking date, say if it is in the past, has no date, is a mess of characters and so on. Once identified they can be deleted, and hopefully all becomes well. This sounding slightly complicated and open to manual errors not to mention the fact that it costs real money put the Poorhouse off a bit.

A bit of further Googling revealed pmClean (follow that link and look towards the bottom of the page). This is a free utility that "Remove all duplicate and stale system Notifications, improving system stability and alarm reliability!" amongst other things like cleaning Internet Explorer caches, temporary files etc. Supporting Windows Mobile 2003, 2003 SE and 5.0 Simply load it onto your PDA, install it and run. Let it whir away a bit and it will show figures allowing you to see how many dodgy notifications it removed. If this amount is 1 or more then perhaps your problem is fixed. The Poorhouse lost maybe 30 of the invalid entries. A reboot of the phone led to numerous real notifications triggering, risking something of a seizure, but once that was done life was back to normal, task and events reminders triggered loudly and annoyingly and the Poorhouse could go back to under-utilising even the small amount of available biological brain capacity.