[REG HACK] Enable instant resuming on WP7!

For those of you with Windows Phone 7 devices, you know the drill. Open an app, get a message, click on it, and then wait 10-15 seconds to go back to what you were doing. Well, thanks to this registry key I found, those days may very well be over
Here's a video of it in action:
As you can see, this allows you to switch between applications without having to wait on the "Resuming..." message. Of course, there's some side effects, but I assume everyone on here knows the drill. Here's the key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\TaskHost\DehydrateOnPause

Set it to 0 to disable dehydration. (Defaults to 3)
You don't even have to restart, just load up an application and lock the device to see the results. Cool, huh?

Now for the side effects:

First off, obviously, this probably won't help your battery much. But it actually might not be that bad, because the applications are still frozen in the background, just not dehydrated (evident with Fruit Ninja where the game pauses AFTER being returned to).
Second side effect involves the camera. With this enabled, sometimes the camera will let you take one picture, and then lock up entirely. This one is tricky, because it happened at first for a while, and then went back to being completely normal (can take pictures, view pictures, etc). Experiment a little with it, and tell me what happens.

The third also only appears sometimes (the same sometimes as when the camera started working again, hint hint), and is not that big of a deal. Basically, sometimes your icons won't load, for whatever reason. Again, this only happens sometimes, and doesn't really effect your device usage.

Side effects aside, this works without any hassle and is completely reversible. Just keep in mind that it is a hack, and you know the deal with those. As usual, it's at your own risk.

Try it out and share what happens.

More info: http://windowsphonehacker.com/articles/exclusive_instant_resuming_on_windows_phone_7_hack-03-19-11

domineus said:

now that's how it should've been to begin with
about how long does the tombstone state take place before immediately having to restart a program
eg
I'm playing fruit ninja -> I get a text message -> after 15-25 seconds -> return to fruit ninja

after the second delay can I go back to the program, or are we still restricted to 15-25 second delay

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

The only time there is a delay is when you launch the application from the start menu (or games hub). When returning to an application, there is no delay.

domineus said:

I'll try on an hd2 of my brothers...any other registry tweaks you've found for optimizing performance?

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

I actually found this when looking for the NoDo startup improvements in the registry, and got sidetracked by something much better I'll be sure to dig around some more once I get more time on my hands.

fiinix said:

Did some tests:

- Test 1

* Silverlight
* 5000 ms pingback
*clip*

- Thoughts: #1 dead, #2 alive, #3 alive, #4 alive

- Test 2:

* XNA

void Update(GameTime gameTime): is not called anymore.
void Draw(): is not called anymore.

- Summary:

All "System.Threading.Timer" are kept alive and will continue "ping" till override'd by new apps.

Threads: Paused ("Timer"'s still alive)

This "tweak" will actually drain the phones battery much faster.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Wait, can you clarify the experiment some more? Whenever I ran a timer in the background, it would freeze the timer until I returned to it. Did you find some sort of way to actually execute code with another application focused?

Also, I think by increasing the QuantumNumber value under the same key will allow you to keep more applications open. Not sure though.