What is a ROM?

[warxhead]

Originally Posted by uaguilar

Are ROMs and Shells free?

Another question, i keep hearing "manila" - is that what i currently use?

Roms are free, but shells are not always free, before you flash a rom, read the how to, so you can hardspl unlock.

[uaguilar]

Will the SPB Shell speed things up? sometimes my TP2 seems slow

[warxhead]

Originally Posted by uaguilar

Will the SPB Shell speed things up? sometimes my TP2 seems slow

If you flash a different rom, sometimes they are faster. I personally don't know about SPB(It's not free), and don't know it's ram usage/cpu usage on the TP2.

[uaguilar]

Why do you call "flashing" a rom? it's just not just installing?

[mjcole2003]

Originally Posted by uaguilar

Why do you call "flashing" a rom? it's just not just installing?

Its basically the lingo used for replacing the old rom with a new one. This definition is from pcmag.com encyclopedia: It has to do with flash memory "flash was invented by Toshiba and named after its ability to erase a block of a data "in a flash." You'll see other references to cooks and kitchens. The cooks are the ones creating ( or cooking) the new roms, and the kitchens are the different...well...programs used to do it. Just take your time and read through these forums and you'll figure all of these things out.

[JimP]

That SPB shell thing does have a free trial period so you can play with it and see if its to your liking. If you don't like it, you just go to remove programs and remove it. Soft boot and its like it was never there. IMO, less prone to breaking something else. If you read enough post from this site, it seems that some of these ROMs break things and to get them working again, you have to reflash to the original ROM. Since I'm not sure that the original ROM has the same built as the one that I've got in the phone (1 month old) I'm not comfortable loosing the original ROM. As far as I know, there's no way to save the original. So for me, it was either a shell or nothing.

What I found was that I was wanting a better user interface, not necessarily replacing the operating system. The SPB shell was interesting, but I didn't care for the style of the clock and weather readings on the home page. I know that those are changable, but I didn't want to start digging around to do that.

There is another shell that someone was working on that hasn't been released yet that I thought would be better. I don't know if they're still working on it or not.

Apparantly, if Verizon does release windows mobile 6.5, it'll also have a new user interface which includes widgets on the home page that'll do what I want.

[TyGeR_STD]

it took me a bit to apply the tearms here to what I'm use to useing when talking about PCs, an someone please correct me if I am wrong, the ROM is like your phones OS, changeing a ROM is like reformatting an installing a new OS on your PC, its a total wipe an clean install of the system. A SHELL is more like an overlay that goes ontop of whatever ROM you are useing, it just lets you customize what you have.

[turboll]

Originally Posted by TyGeR_STD

it took me a bit to apply the tearms here to what I'm use to useing when talking about PCs, an someone please correct me if I am wrong, the ROM is like your phones OS, changeing a ROM is like reformatting an installing a new OS on your PC, its a total wipe an clean install of the system. A SHELL is more like an overlay that goes ontop of whatever ROM you are useing, it just lets you customize what you have.

exactly!

[hc3cuz]

Can somebody link me to a thread that shows exactly in detail how to flash roms on TP2? Im a noob to this but i am really interested in flashing a rom on my TP2

[cohowap]

Read all the stickies here. http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=98

GL