Melting Ice cream, put it back in the freezer!

So after installing the latest ROM I found that it wasn't really 100% compatible with my phone. There were basically constant failures with the android keyboard, which meant that because it's a critical part of the system it would fail, quit and reload about every 5-6 seconds with a pop up error message you had to confirm. Quite annoying.
Then wifi would not connect any more out of the blue and no amount of tinkering would make it work.
Reload time and it failed horribly
.I had to completely wipe the phone and reload a stock bootloader and ROM and then start from scratch again.
I used unrevoked3 to do this on my mac. http://unrevoked.com/
Before I did this I had to put on a version 2.0 ROM to get it to a state where it could be reloaded. I can't remember what 2.0 ROM is used but a quick search will net you about two dozen samples to try.
Unrevoked3 is a very simple program. Put the phone in debug mode, plug in the USB cable and start up the program. It'll detect the phone and start the process, reboot the phone for you and install the new ROM.

It worked very well and got me back to a usable state.
From there I loaded a new ROM onto the SD card and rebooted the phone into recovery mode, VolDown+ Power, selected the new ROM and let it load.
I decided to go with BCM RC4.1 Update 2 ROM modded by DK-Zero-Cool. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1403113
It's a CyanoGen ROM customized for first gen Desire's and it works very very well.

So far I haven't had any problems with this ROM, so if you are looking for something to try on your rooted android then give it a shot and see what it's like.

-Colin.

Ice cream Sandwiches!

Today I ditched my good old reliable custom ROM on my phone, MIUI, and upgraded to the latest dev release of ice cream sandwich by MildWild for my HTC Desire.
The link can be found here.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1453287

The installation was pretty smooth and to play it save I backed up all my information to my main micro SD card and used my spare old card to do the installation.
I'd recommend this for anyone doing a ROM flash. If you don't have a spare, micro SD's are cheap these days so go pick one up.
$8 CAD for an 8GB card at http://www.canadacomputers.com/

Well worth it.

I had my phone already rooted and had previously had hboot installed. If you don't have them done, you'll need to do both before installing your custom ROM.
I'd suggest checking out the All things Desire root guide over at android forums for info on how to do this.
http://androidforums.com/desire-all-things-root/503471-desire-all-things-root-guide.html

It's actually a pretty simple upgrade.
Root your phone.
Download the ROM.
Put the spare SD card in your phone.
Format the SD card while in the phone.
Mount the phone for USB storage.
Drag the new zipped ROM over to your phone.
Reboot the phone with Power+Vol-Down
Choose install from zip from SD
Choose the zipped ROM and go.
Wait for it to install, reboot and you are done.

All in all it took about 10 minutes to do and now it'll be hours of playing with the phone to see what's new and to tweak it and customize it.

If you've got a phone that is out of warranty I'd highly recommend trying it, but as with everything that is not a factory install. Use at your own risk.
That being said, I've flashed about a dozen custom ROM's onto my phone to try them out and have never once had a problem.

-Colin.