So I have had my HTC Desire for a week and I love it. However on Monday morning I had a major issue when the Alarm did not go off and I slept in for an hour and a half – fortunately as I had planned to get up early for a run I ended up being only 11 minutes late for work. I had set it up over the weekend and had tested it on Sunday night to make sure it was loud enough to wake me – so I was very confused as to why it did go off or if it did go off – how I managed to sleep through it!

I got into work and tried to demonstrate the issue to one of my colleagues but could not replicate the problem – the alarm went off each time. I initially though maybe it was because I set the phone to silent overnight and that the alarm did not vibrate or make a noise if the phone was set to silent but this was not the case as when I tested it again the alarm worked perfectly regardless of whether it was on vibrate, silent or normal.

I was puzzled – how could an alarm work only some of the time?

On Thursday, the same thing happened to my colleague at work – he was less lucky and ended up being 2 hours and 15 mins late for work!

We eventually realised that we had both installed Advanced Task Killer Free and had set up an automatic schedule to kill tasks every so many hours.  The list of tasks to kill included the Clock App. We tested to confirm and sure enough if you set the alarm and kill all tasks the alarm doesn’t go off.

So the solution? Either add the Clock App to your safe list in the Task Killer or just don’t use the task killer at all!