Motorola Milestone - How to make the best of it - What really matters

Well, I thought that my last post about custom ROMs for the Milestone would be the last in the series, but as you can see it is not. The custom ROM I have installed led me to another problem, low RAM that is. So while I recommended to everyone to keep their launchers in memory at all times, I realized that you can't take full advantage of the low RAM of the Milestone in this case. So I sought out a resolution to this problem. After giving up some stuff like homescreen widgets I finally managed to achieve a setup that will allow you to take full advantage of the RAM. The homescreen widgets are memory hogs, and not just that. They also cause slow start on any homescreen I've tried so far. My goal was to have a homescreen setup that will allow the homescreen app to load very quickly after it has been closed. So now my setup is the following: two or three pages of the homescreen with only contacts and shortcuts.

NO WIDGETS! Very important to remember. So I use either the default MM homescreen or LauncherPro. LauncherPro was the only homescreen app that loaded in 2-3 seconds with this setup after it's closed. I do not have the launcher locked in memory, because I found some apps(Angry Birds Seasons and some others) that need more RAM than it's available. So now, after I run some memory intensive app, the launcher gets killed, but when I return to the homescreen I have it up and running in maximum 3 seconds. As I said before my goal was a very fast loading of the homescreen application, and not how much RAM the app eats while running.

A fast start of the launcher cancels the need to have a low memory homescreen, because now it can be killed at any time and load very quickly when needed. Now I don't know how much RAM LauncherPro eats up, and I frankly no longer care. I am very happy with this setup and have been using it for some days now. I replaced my Twitter and Facebook widgets with shortcuts to the full fledged apps.

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