Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level! SHUT DOWN ALL THE GARBAGE MASHERS ON THE DETENTION LEVEL!

Dear Diary,
I love my Viewsonic 'g' tablet but once in a while it can be a PITA.  Last night it had a hissy fit, with 'android.process.acore' Force Closing repeatedly.


Fortunately it has done this to me before and I knew where to look for answers.  (That would be the XDA Developers forums as I believe I have mentioned before)  It seems to happen after installing new software applications and apparently is related to the sqlite database for the address book.  Unfortunately, it doesn't always manifest right away so you don't necessarily know which application is the culprit.

The "easy" way to to try to resolve it is to back out / uninstall the last round application updates one by one - I start by removing any newly installed applications, deeming them to be the most likely.  Uninstalls are easy enough but of course you lose any data so installing 'Titanium Backup' from the Android Marketplace is highly recommended.  Titanium Backup allows you to back up applications and data and restore older versions from those backups, plus it keeps running even when android.process.acore going up and down like a yoyo.

I habitually use Titanium to back up important apps before upgrading them in the marketplace and I never click [Update All] in the Marketplace.  I did that unintentionally right before this happened to me the first time and had to uninstall about 8 applications before I resolved things.  Lesson learned.

The scarier way to fix this is to delete some files and wipe data.

This time around I made my own notes and later today I plan to spend some time trying to re-create the scenario and resolve it reliably rather than fumbling around.

I love Android and my 'g' tablet but I feel sorry for any non-technical user who gets hit with this kind of issue and has no clue how to resolve it or even where to look for answers.

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