Help Rooting/Flashing?

[lronglien]

Can someone please explain to me what "flashing" means? Also, how can I tell if my phone has been rooted? I paid a guy $75 to root it-took him about 3 hours. But I don't know if its successful or not. He did load the Sirius XM app for me, which until recently was not available in the market. Elsewhere on this forum I was told to download the aLogCat app to see what was running under the hood of this Captivate. I was told messages in "red" were error messages. Here is a sample of some of them I'm getting:

Powermanagerservice (somewhat frequent)
Sensormanager (Very frequent)
Newmessage TTS
Logsprovider
Cachedbluetoothdevice (repeated error messages)
Bluetoothproxymanager (repeated error messages)
dgb.wss.dmi

Are any of these messages serious? Sometimes the phone goes to sleep and then I have to take the battery out to re-start it.

When I use the error log, there seems to be many messages in a row sometimes.

I have a Mac computer if that makes any difference in what I may have to do. Thanks for any help.

 

[sremick]

"Flashing" is the installing of core system software onto the phone.

A simple way to see if you're rooted is to install and launch Titanium Backup. It'll tell you on startup.

If you paid someone $75 to root your phone, you got ripped off. Takes about 30 seconds and is easy to do yourself. See the Captivate FAQ:

Root - CapFAQ

 

[lronglien]

Thanks for the info. I installed titaniam and it says I need to go and check the box unknown sources under applications in the settings menu. When I go there, there is no unknown sources listed. Not sure what's next.

Question: is there a program like iTunes I can install, plug this in and let the program guide me to upgrading my phone's performance?

 

[sremick]

Thanks for the info. I installed titaniam and it says I need to go and check the box unknown sources under applications in the settings menu. When I go there, there is no unknown sources listed. Not sure what's next.

You can ignore that message. The checkbox doesn't exist on the Captivate as AT&T has removed it, but TB doesn't really require it with the Captivate anyway. If you get the pro/donate version (which you really want to do) it goes away.

Question: is there a program like iTunes I can install, plug this in and let the program guide me to upgrading my phone's performance?

No. The Android is designed to be different than the iPhone. It's managed in entirely different ways. It gives you far more power, but the price of that is less guided handholding in what you do with it. Just as you won't see an automatic transmission in an F1 race car.

 

[lronglien]

Thank you again. I read the FAQ on rooting the Captivate. I guess my final question for now would be what I need to do to improve the lag time on my apps. Do some of these Alps get corrupted over time? My Google Voice kept shutting down today...I uninstalled it and the reinstalled it and it seems to be fine now. But some apps seem to take a long time to load. Given that I don't believe thus phone has been rooted, I'm wondering about improving performance. Thanks.

 

[sremick]

Thank you again. I read the FAQ on rooting the Captivate. I guess my final question for now would be what I need to do to improve the lag time on my apps. Do some of these Alps get corrupted over time? My Google Voice kept shutting down today...I uninstalled it and the reinstalled it and it seems to be fine now. But some apps seem to take a long time to load. Given that I don't believe thus phone has been rooted, I'm wondering about improving performance. Thanks.

The lag is mostly due to bad choices Samsung made in the Captivate's filesystem. Unfortunately, the "fixes" are high-risk unofficial hacks that involve making serious changes to your phone (and voiding its warranty), and involve incurring significant risk. It's not for the faint of heart.