Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Ah, yes: I owe the latest phone saga story.
I'll keep it short. Last night I decided to flash the ROM. I found a list of steps and followed them to the letter. All was well until I got to one step and discovered that the software wouldn't run on a 64-bit OS. Not only that, but my phone got stuck in the bootloader, a rainbow-hued screen that shows the phone is waiting patiently for a software update.
Man, I thought I had a brick.
I finally found a little utility that I could run on my notebook PC that supposedly stood a good chance of resetting the phone. Sure enough, it worked. I moved all of the software to my notebook PC and started the process again. Everything was okay until I started to run the ROM update. I got a DOS window that promptly closed. I decided to get another copy of the software, and it was *almost* fine. I had to use an extraction program to get all of the bits out into a folder. The stuff is in a RAR instead of a ZIP that most Windows users are familiar with.
Extracted the files, started the process, and after ten minutes or so I got a message stating that the ROM was invalid. And I was stuck in another boot loader. I was able to get out of that one with a reset, so at least my phone was still alive. After several tries I took another look at the download. It was a file with a name almost too long to fit in the window, but when I got to the end I discovered it ended in .ex instead of .exe. I added the last "e," double-clicked the file, and it all ran like a champ.
Now I have GPS, which means I've spent the day playing with GPS applications along with reloading everything on the phone.
I have a huge folder of programs that I've downloaded; some I've kept on the phone, others are one-shot utilities, still others are things I've tried but didn't like. A couple of programs have been rendered obsolete by the update. As I reloaded the phone I moved the software I actually had put on the device into a separate folder. Next time, the process shouldn't be quite so hit-and-miss.
Tags: Technology