Newbie Questions...

[jmorton10]

Originally Posted by ou2mame

like others have said, give the stock rom some time, and get used to the phone. use it for a month or two, figure out what you want the phone to do, and what it can't do, install some reg edits, cabs, etc, and try to make the phone do as much of what you want it to do as you can. if, and when, you require something above and beyond what the stock rom can provide, you'll at least know what you're looking for when choosing a rom, as well as have an understanding of what your phone actually is.

I agree with this 100%.

I have been building custom PC's for years & even owned a business doing that for a few years. I have installed motherboards/done a million BIOS flashes/formatted hard drives & installed Windows from scratch etc etc etc

That experience made modifying a PPC less intimidating for me (I've known for years that no matter how bad you mess things up there is almost always SOME way to undo or fix the damage you've done)

That being said, it still worried me a little doing the first ROM update I ever did. I had bought an xv6800 Verizon phone back when they where fairly new expecting it to be a killer setup. To say I was disappointed in it the way it came stock would be an understatement. No GPS, the lack of memory, laggy operation, unusably low earpiece volume etc etc etc made me seriously consider if a PPC was even worth owning at the time.

Before sticking the thing on ebay, I did a fair bit of Goggle searching on my problems however & stumbled across this site. I'm sure glad I did as this site is amazing. I decided after a TON of reading here that I needed to update the radio/ROM combination before I would ever be happy with the phone. I found a clear concise step by step guide to do that here & decided to give it a shot. Everything went like clockwork (much easier than I was led to expect) & I absolutely LOVED the results. After that, I must have flashed that thing 30 times or more. When I got to nueROM3 I stopped flashing as the system worked absolutely perfect, was very fast & I could see absolutely nothing to gain by further mods. I used the 6800/Titan that way (highly modded & tweaked with a TON of programs installed) until the TouchPro became available.

I wasn't at all sure I would like the TP better (& I still miss some of the Titan stuff like the scroll wheel & dedicated keys for inet/messaging etc), but I knew if I didn't like it I could easily dump it on ebay & reactivate the 6800. I have been a Verizon customer since leaving Sprint. I hate vz's gimped phone selection however so I bought a brand new Sprint TP off ebay & converted it to Verizon service.

I only had the Sprint ROM on the phone long enough to make sure the phone actually turned on & worked & then flashed it to the leaked Verizon ROM. That was the only other ROM available at the time. I figured it would annoy me like the 6800 stock vz setup & I would reflash as soon as custom ROM's started to become available. That has not been the case however.

After I got it running on Verizon & made sure all the features/data etc all worked correctly, I did every speed & TF3D tweak I could find & started using it as my everyday work phone. I use about every feature there is in this system. I use a Slingbox mobile setup every day (both at work & in my truck). The video out allows me to hook the TP to the 7" DVD/NAV screen in my truck & get the video & sound from my killer sound system & also allows me to hook up to TV sets in hotel rooms. I have a 16 gig card filled with movies & MP3 files. I use weather panel from a 2nd today screen. I have a half dozen GPS programs including GarminXT & EVERYTHING works great.

I am still using that original vz ROM & so far anyway, I have had absolutely no reason whatever to change to anything else. Unlike the stock xv6800 (which I ended up flashing three times in one day at one point), all the features of the phone (including GPS locks in less than 60 seconds) work perfectly. With all the tweaks done, TF3D is very smooth & fast with no lag at all. At this point, I am 100% happy with the setup & I'm not sure I will ever reflash the thing. I can't see what I would gain by flashing, just for the sake of doing it (although some day when I'm bored I may do it anyway just because I love tweaking)

~John