What Does the OQO Manager Manage?

[Guest]

[Dave P]

In a number of posts, the value and/or the performance of the OQO Manager has been debated. Without getting into that, I have two questions:

What exactly does the OQO Manager do?

What functionality is lost by not starting the OQO Manager?

[fixup]

All it should do is a ACPI module between the Windows kernal (HAL) and BIOS for power management. This one is absolutely necessary. The brightness adjustment is the only other necessary function. EVDO radio control is good to have but not absolutely necessary.

However the program is ambitious and want to provide lots of more convenient stuff for you:

Volume up, down, mute (can be easily done by Windows),
Video keys - zoom, rotate, desk, video (all can be done better with the S3 video driver),
Wireless management (Windows takes care of it very well).

The problem is, even the most basic function, ACPI bridge, is not done right. For example, oqomanager stops CPU throttling and put my oqo running at the max speed. No need to mention all the problems with other functions as mentioned in other threads.

You lose nothing except brightness adjustment if you don't run oqomanager.

[Dave P]

First, thanks for your reply.

All it should do is a ACPI module between the Windows kernal (HAL) and BIOS for power management. This one is absolutely necessary.

For power management, would a program such as Network Hardware Control (NHC) or, for that matter, the Vista power management functions serve as well?

[nivenh]

In a number of posts, the value and/or the performance of the OQO Manager has been debated. Without getting into that, I have two questions:

What exactly does the OQO Manager do?

What functionality is lost by not starting the OQO Manager?

i'll try to sum it up here...

OQO Manager does...

- DisplaySense (automatic display switching), intelligent monitor adjustment and rotation, etc.
- Fn-key functionality, such as Brightness/Volume, Show Desktop, Kbd light toggle, etc.
- Wireless Dashboard, radio control, auto-connection..
- Zoom
- Touchscroller settings, fan settings, etc (avail. through OQO Settings)
- Lots of other tricks to speed up standby/resume time, save battery, etc.

A good chunk of what Fixup said above is inaccurate.  The problem with dashboard kicking up the cpu a notch during a radio check is pretty minor and will be addressed, but other than that, i'm not aware of any major problems.  I'm happy to receive constructive criticism, so if you are having issues making you consider removing it, I'd like to know what they are.

[fixup]

Dave: Nope. All 3rd party power management programs such as NHC rely on ACPI interface which must be provided by the laptop manufacturer (i.e. OQO in this case).

Please specify which I said was inaccurate.

Keyboard light toggle, fan settings and many other things are done by BIOS, not by OQOManager.exe.

Please do not confuse some of the useful modules (such as ACPI) that's got installed when you install oqomanager with the oqomanager.exe executable which is what I hate. I'm sorry if I did not make that clear.

[nivenh]

All it should do is a ACPI module between the Windows kernal (HAL) and BIOS for power management. This one is absolutely necessary. The brightness adjustment is the only other necessary function.

I'm not sure what you're saying in the first sentence, but OQO Manager has nothing to do with ACPI, HAL or the BIOS.  Brightness adjustment works fine w/o OQO Manager, there's just no UI for it.

The problem is, even the most basic function, ACPI bridge, is not done right. For example, oqomanager stops CPU throttling and put my oqo running at the max speed. No need to mention all the problems with other functions as mentioned in other threads.

There is no ACPI bridge in the sense that you're talking about it.  Your CPU stops being idling because its being used during the radio checks as i mentioned in your other threads on this subject.

You lose nothing except brightness adjustment if you don't run oqomanager.

This is incorrect for the reasons above in addition to the features I listed.  You lose quite a bit without it, however we designed things so that OQO Manager is not required at all, but just makes life easier.

[fixup]

If there is no ACPI bridge, I applogize and take my those words back on this regard. I got the impression because Windows 2000 cannot talk to OQO's ACPI, so I thought the ACPI interface must have been provided by OQO on XP.

I added to my above post: it is the oqomanager.exe that's the problem. This executable actually makes my life much harder.

[mcoqo]

i have never started oqo manager, am I missing something?

[nivenh]

If there is no ACPI bridge, I applogize and take my those words back on this regard. I got the impression because Windows 2000 cannot talk to OQO's ACPI, so I thought the ACPI interface must have been provided by OQO on XP.

Vendors typically just implement the ACPI parts in the BIOS and EC as required by the OS's they're planning to support.  It may be that 2000 requires things that XP did not, etc.  I'm not an EC/BIOS engineer, so i don't know all the ins and outs about this, just that we haven't needed to do anything specific at the Windows level to support ACPI properly for our supported platforms.

For OQO Manager, ACPI serves as a communication layer to our embedded controller per Microsoft spec's on the subject, and that's all.  So for instance when you uncheck the Drop Detection box in OQO Settings, that message travels over the ACPI channel to the EC (made by OQO), and the EC stops checking the accelerometer from that point forward.

I added to my above post: it is the oqomanager.exe that's the problem. This executable actually makes my life much harder.

Aside from the cpu problem during radio check, what else is there that is making things harder for you?

[nivenh]

i have never started oqo manager, am I missing something?

it runs automatically at login if you have it installed.

[fixup]

Aside from the cpu problem during radio check, what else is there that is making things harder for you?

It still uses too much CPU time, 10-14% every few seconds, even without wireless.oqo plugin enabled.

Lose key strokes and mouse clicks (especially double-click).

Cannot go virtual (expanded) screen mode like 800x600 which is to me the best screen mode for 800x480 screens - readable text and full dialog boxes. With 1000x600 mode, I have to use zoom frequently, which is no compare to the looks of 800x600.

WiFi control is flaky. I use the radio dashboard to turn the WiFi off. After each and every reboot, the WiFi radio is turned off but the WiFi driver is still enabled. Windows XP keeps prompting me that cannot connect to WiFi. After many try and error, I finally get it entirely turned off.

These are what I can remember at this moment, I have not used it for quite sometime now.

For those who want to remove oqomanager.exe from auto start, it is under this registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

[nivenh]

It still uses too much CPU time, 10-14% every few seconds, even without wireless.oqo plugin enabled.

I thought you had said previously in another thread that it was fine w/o wireless.oqo loaded.

Lose key strokes and mouse clicks (especially double-click).

and not having oqomanager running fixes this?  oqomanager doesn't restrict keys or clicks, it just watches.  in doing hooks, windows will never let a key drop that was actually sent.  you can verify this by writing a test app that installs a keyboard & mouse hook, and pausing it in a debugger.  the mouse will jerk and keys will appear slowly, but they are never dropped.

Cannot go virtual (expanded) screen mode like 800x600 which is to me the best screen mode for 800x480 screens - readable text and full dialog boxes. With 1000x600 mode, I have to use zoom frequently, which is no compare to the looks of 800x600.

You're the first person i've heard of that prefers a stretched 800x600, hehe.  It sounds like what you really want is a larger screen.  I'm guessing you're doing this from the S3 utility, is OQO manager interfering with you being able to keep that setting?

WiFi control is flaky. I use the radio dashboard to turn the WiFi off. After each and every reboot, the WiFi radio is turned off but the WiFi driver is still enabled. Windows XP keeps prompting me that cannot connect to WiFi. After many try and error, I finally get it entirely turned off.

Is anyone else here seeing this?  We haven't seen anything like this here or had any customer complaints come through on this.

Also fwiw, i can only accept bugs against the latest available OQO Manager.  IIRC in previous conversations, I got the impression you were using a pretty heavily modded Windows install and several tweak utilities, one of which held the processor at 300mhz or something.  Is that true?

[fixup]

Without wireless.oqo plugin, it is better but still not what I can accept.

The lost key strokes and mouse clicks are due to slow response caused by oqomanager.exe. Most people might never realize this; they just think they did not press the key down enough or did not double-click fast enough. Plus it does not happen all the time. That's what I thought initially until I checked task manager and saw how much CPU time oqomanager.exe was using.

It does not matter me or people like 800x600 or not, it is not fair to the customers when this feature is there but forbidden. If I did not try win2000, I would never have known that this mode is there. If people don't even know about it, how could they like it or not? Yes I use S3 to get this mode (and all other features such as arbitrary rotate that oqonamager.exe cannot do). Yes, oqomanager.exe keeps getting me back to 800x480 or 1000x600. After try and error, I finally fixed that.

I'm not running anything special, just a straight recovery from the OQO DVD disc. The only 3rd-party program I use is NHC; I use it to force 400MHz. I did try install Win2000 but it cannot support oqo's ACPI.

[fixup]

I just remembered a big bug of oqomanager.exe: it puts all system tray prompts (such as today's date when I move my mouse pointer over the clock) behind the task bar.

[dlach]

I just remembered a big bug of oqomanager.exe: it puts all system tray prompts (such as today's date when I move my mouse pointer over the clock) behind the task bar.

I don't have this problem.  I also don't have wireless problems mentioned but since I hardly ever restart or hibernate, so I might not notice them.

My biggest complaints about the system:
- keyboard dead problem mentioned in other threads (requires USB kb to recover).
- mouse drift that requires me to pop back into standby and out again.
- ridiculously slow mouse response under heavy system load.

I also have to retract a rant thread I started a while back about how the OQO should support a "seamless" connectivity model like the iPhone.  I realized after thinking about it that it is pretty difficult given the nature of tcp/ip.  I wonder how Apple does it.

Nivenh, thanks for your hard work.  I'm looking forward to the next release.