Updated recently (late last month) but somewhat unheralded, I'd like to put that straight with a mention of a utility that we've never reviewed formally yet might be the very thing to help you sort out an 'under the hood' issue with your Symbian smartphone: Y-Tasks. Part process manager, part application manager, part (RAM) memory optimiser, Y-Tasks is a real jack of all trades and v1.01 is screenshotted below.

Y-Tasks is, somewhat confusingly, available both for £1.50 in the Nokia Store and also for free in 'self-signed' or 'unsigned' form on the author's web site. The simple answer is that the former has been digitally signed to work with the innermost parts of Symbian OS, whereas the self-signed one has more limited functionality. And if you have to ask how you can get the 'unsigned' version working then you aren't geeky enough to do it....!

At its simplest though, users who want to know a bit more about their smartphone's inner workings can just buy Y-Tasks in the usual way and it will arrive full working, as shown in the walkthrough below.

The main menu, essentially a collection of seven very loosely related utilities; exploring all the filetypes in Symbian OS and displaying which application is currently assigned (if any) to handle each - you can change the allocation using the menu; showing running applications (including system ones, normally hidden from the Symbian task switcher)

Displaying system information on a running application - the stack size (related to the amount of RAM being used) is perhaps most relevant here; examining processes and threads in Symbian OS, there are typically well over a hundred running at any one time - note the search box to help find a possible culprit; graphical 'memory status', including the important RAM figure and the less well known RAM disk D: - no, I'm not quite sure exactly which apps are allowed to access this either!

Each module in Y-Tasks has an excellent explanatory Help text, as here for the Crash Monitor function; tucked away with the Memory status module is this handy 'Compress RAM' function, tidying up fragmented system RAM and perhaps saving having to reboot to reclaim performance later on; and the Trace function, essentially plotting processor loading and free RAM as a function of time.

In normal use, most users will never, ever need something like Y-Tasks. But when the chips are down and that game just keeps crashing or when you're trying to work out which installed app is causing a battery issue, then at least remember that this utility exists and how to get hold of it.

You can buy Y-Tasks in the Nokia Store here.