[snowds]

Props go out to negamann and all the others on this forum who have contributed. I'm a total noob when it comes to mobile platforms. I didn't even know what flashing a rom meant a few days ago (much less IPLs, SPLs, CIDs, RUUs and all the other acronyms), but knew I wanted 6.1 on my 6900 and VZW was slower than a sloth in getting it up. After spending a couple of days reading primer materials, I took the leap and followed the tutorial in this thread. I used the Sprint ROM and then flashed negamann's ROM with Mobile Office. Followed the instructions to the letter, and voila, I'm running 6.1 on my VZ6900. I had to call to reauth my phone, but it was no big deal. I first tried *22800 and it ran through and said my phone was programmed, but I could not send/receive calls or txt until I called them.

GPS works great (locked on to 6 satellites within 30 sec), MS Office attachments work fine, exchange server syncing works fine. I have the dysfunctional Scenarios icon on my Today screen, but I'll tackle that over the next day or two. My only point of confusion was upon unpacking negamann's rom, there were several executable files, and I didn't know which to run. I ran the RUU, and that turned out to be right. I had to remove my Touchpal, which automatically synced back onto the device, but needs a different build when going from 6.0 and 6.1. The 6.1 build works great, and I highly recommend Touchpal.

Thanks everybody for your efforts and sharing of experience. I hope to be able to contribute something useful as I learn a bit more and start doing my own creative cooking.