I hereby declare Thursday, April 21st was Digital Restoration Day. The moment I walked in the door after work, Lara pounced on me and told me that she had shut down her computer because a window had popped up indicating that she had fifty or so horrible viruses on it. As she guessed, it was a fake message produced by adware of some sort. Starting with the usual, I ran microsoft security essentials, which identified and quarantined the adware. I did a manual update of the malicious software removal tool and gave that a run as well. After a reboot, the machine ran normally, and Lara went back to her online projects.
My next project was my cell phone. I live on my android phone, but it had been getting quirky for the last few months — long latency when switching apps, unexplained crashes, general orneriness. Last year, I had gotten tired of waiting for T-mobile to upgrade my HTC Magic 32b (i.e., T-mobile MyTouch) from it’s original (v 1.5?) android install. Mainly, I wanted tethering ability and some of the bells and whistles of the later versions. T-mobile kept promising over the air upgrades, but after a few months, that got old — particularly when all of their new and shiny phones were being sold with the new operating system, but I was stuck with my dinosaur.
Last year, I rooted the phone and installed a then-current version of the Cyanogen Mod. The HTC Magic followed the Google G1, so it was the second android phone on the market. Although it supports a 8 GB sdcard, the onboard memory is limited, so I had to install the “tiny” version of the Google apps, and otherwise be careful about memory allocation. Over time, the phone slowed down and became buggy. It got quite annoying. Tonight, I grabbed the highest version 6 cyanogen stable release, did a factory wipe/reset, and installed the updated operating system. It booted without a problem, grabbed my settings from the cloud, and I’m back in business today with a phone that is not only more stable, but a lot perkier.
Now to reload some apps.