h1ghlevelb1ts

I finally had enough and rooted my HTC Desire. After all my problems with this phone I finally decided to root it and install the latest Android version on it. The final straw was that my phone got slower and slower, because it was running out of space on the phone internal storage. Not even App 2 SD would help anymore, since many apps would just refuse to be moved.

There are plenty of instructions out there on how to do this, so I don't want to repeat too much. I basically followed these instructions. There are four simple steps:

• Make a backup (eg MyBackup)
• Root the phone. For Mac users there is a very simple app Unrevoked. I had to reset my phone to factory settings before it worked. Trying to root the phone with the software updates I had was not possible.
• Install the ROM Manager and follow the instructions for ClockworkMod Recovery. I was happy that I did that, because I had to reset my original state several times, before I got things working.
• Download the ROM you want to install follow the instructions to install it. The important thing is say yes, when asked whether to wipe data and cache. Wipe it all! I went through several iterations ending up in endless loops, because I did not do that.  

Once your new ROM is booting and working you can reply your backup and reconfigure your apps.

What did I gain? First of heaps of battery time :-) Now my battery lasts for a day and I can even leave it over night without waking up having a dead phone. So I can definitely confirm that HTC Sense is a useless battery drain. Also some of the new Android Gingerbread feature are quite nice. With the rooted phone I can now also move more apps to the external storage which helped a lot as well.

One could say that I have rediscovered my joy in owning an Android phone :-)

--Hardy