BigRedGonzo

My wife has an Eris. It works flawlessly, but hasn't always done so. After the 2.1 update, she had all sorts of odd issues. Random things running themselves, phone autocalling someone she seldom calls, etc... She took it to the Verizon store. The rep downloaded a task killer and said that that would take care of all of her problems. The problems only multiplied. At this point she (my wife) decided to tell me about the problems she was having (she tends to be a bit independent.) I did a hot battery pull and that did nothing. I uninstalled some suspicious apps, which did not help. I finally convinced her that the VZW rep didn't have a clue about how to correct the problem and she let me uninstall the task killer. Well that got us back to the starting point. After convincing her that a factory reset wouldn't lose anything that she had on the phone, she agreed to let me do that. After the factory reset, the phone has worked flawlessly. Battery life is good, no haphazard occurrences, no random dialing...

On the Android OS, the only time a task killer is of any good is when you have a poorly coded app that doesn't shut itself down properly. Your phone is designed to manage tasks itself and when an app is written well, this feature works well. If you must have a task killer installed, limit it to only kill apps that you have installed and that you know don't do anything in the background. For example, if you have a calculator program that you installed, it obviously doesn't need to stay active when you finish with it. Set your task killer to kill this type of software, not the native stuff on the phone. I had a friend that went the task killer route and somehow got it to kill the service that polled the radio for incoming calls. This caused all sorts of issues.

On to the factory reset... Evidently the "Seamless" upgrade for 2.1 wasn't "Seamless" on all phones. I have a few friends that got the upgrade and had no issues at all, but I also have a couple of friends (and my wife) that received an OTA gone sour. My personal experience with the factory reset on both my wife's phone and a friends was that it went very smoothly and after reactivating and reregistering the phone (on google,) all of the apps that they had installed came back within an hour of the reset and all of the issues that they were receiving were gone.

Bottom line, be careful (very careful) with a task killer, I would recommend finding the offending app(s) and dealing with them and just getting rid of the task killer. Do a factory reset, it can't hurt and in my experience, resolves the issues that some folks see with the OTA.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I'm at work and don't want to do anything and this makes me looks as though I'm working.

BigRedGonzo