Help HTC desire crashes and restarts randomly

Hi all, took my Desire in to Carphonewarehouse 2 weeks ago because it has been crashing and then rebooting for about 3 months, picked it back up yesterday, it worked fine last nite but today its been freezing, crashing and coming up with a screen that has 3 little androids on skateboards, and a load of writing on the top. Done my head right in. Its going back tomorrow. Not happy...

Hi all,

I got my Desire Z in June 2011, and until mid September it was functioning properly.

Then it started having problems: first it switched off, one or two times a day. It happened when it was at rest, never when it was being used.

In October it started making a reset, that is, it switched off but restarted at once, asking for the PIN. Most of the time I didn't notice that it had a reset, so I loosed some calls.

In the meantime I started reading this thread and found all of you with similar problems but no real solution.

Three weeks ago, and before taking it for repair I made a factory reset, and didn't install anything one week long. No resets.

Since then I have been installing 1 or 2 applications a day, and I have the phone almost as it was before.

And it works flawlessly.

About 6 or 7 applications I didn't install because I had found out I don't need them.

So what was it ? I don't know. But I wanted to leave here my experience, perhaps it helps someone.

Mektub

Dear All,
I hope this will help to some of you:
I had the same problem with my HTC Desire S (purchased a week ago) with the random restarts (for me was mainly happening when using the bluetooth connection in my car).
I changed the Network settings yesterday to GSM ONLY, since then no issue with the random restarts anymore.
Let's see how this evolves, can keep you posted.

What I did was taking the phone apart, take out the bottom pcb.
At the back (front side) there is a metal cover. Remove it, and use a solder heat gun to heat the processor and reflow the connections. Let it rest for 10 minutes and put the phone back together.

My Desire does not reboot any more!

billyroy said:

What I did was taking the phone apart, take out the bottom pcb.
At the back (front side) there is a metal cover. Remove it, and use a solder heat gun to heat the processor and reflow the connections. Let it rest for 10 minutes and put the phone back together.

My Desire does not reboot any more!

Click to expand...

Are you seriour billyroy? you really fixed it like that?
mine has that problem for about a year, and it started after warranty was over.
Can you send images/video or a detailed description on how to do that without messing up my phone?
Thanks

Joelo, HTC give a 2 year warranty on the Desire (certainly in the UK), so are you sure your warranty is over?

I have no interest in HTC devices (owned a Touch Diamond, didn't like it, went back to Nokia and SE) but i thought i'd chime in re the rebooting issue.

A friend of mine brought his Desire in with the random reboot issue. He got the phone used about 6 months ago, so in the winter. Now as the weather got hot, the phone would reboot when playing games or browsing the web. Just like it happened to the rest of you.

I've fixed several laptops by applying flux and reflowing the GPU or video RAM chips. Heck, i've fixed my own HP DV9000 more times than i care to remember (has to be at least 5 or 6 times, and i'm on my second motherboard), that is until i cut a hole in the case and fitted an extra fan on the GPU. Hasn't failed since.

So when i saw billyroy's post i thought what the heck... it's worth a shot. I took the shield off the CPU side of the board, set my hot air station to 375C, and heated the CPU area for 3 minutes. I then waited 15 minutes for the board to cool down and re-assembled the phone. Well, i played so much Angry Birds that i got bored (over 1 hour) without a problem. Before, it used to reboot after a couple minutes in almost any game. We'll see if it lasts this summer, but for now it's working great.

If you want to try the same, set the temperature at 350-375 deg C, have the air at 4-5 liters/minute, and don't hold the nozzle of the heat gun closer than 1cm from the board. I've learned on my own by breaking a couple motherboards, these values i'm telling you are tried and true.

What i found disturbing is that although the shield touches the CPU, there is no thermal interface material between them! It seems like a major design oversight to have something to use as a heatsink and not use it. In fact, i wonder whether the "fixed" boards HTC has been sending have just this as their only change. I added a blob of thermal paste to the CPU prior to putting the shield back on.

Tzast said:

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Android and smartphones in general so I was hoping for some advice, tips, etc for the problem I'm having.

Got my HTC desire almost 2 weeks ago and while the first few days it did happen to restart on its own, it only happened once or twice so didn't pay attention thinking it's the odd thing... (in fact i thought it had to do with the flash player and playing videos embedded in web pages).

Last week though, this has been happening more often and on doing different occassions, so can't isolate it. Once, it happened while browsing my contacts, then when browsing web pages, then something else (can't remember). The odd thing the last two days is that the first restart triggered a series of restarts back to back without my intervention, and after 2-3 it came back to normal.

As I said I haven't been able to replicate it fully or isolate the cause, but things i thought might be the reason, don't seem to be. Flash or videos in web pages seem to work, as i went back to some of these pages and now they load fine. May be the fact that when loading these through wifi is quicker and hence no problems. Or when charging it or not, think i've tried both when some of the restarts happened. But then that wouldn't explain other crashes.

I called carphonewarehouse where i got the phone from and since it's less than 28 days they can probably replace it, but i just wanted to make sure it's not a genuine phone/android issue that i obviously miss.

Any tips or advise would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Click to expand...

doing a hard reset might fix this.

So my desire had started this "reboot when warm" problem all over again for the third time. I have had the main board replaced twice, each time lasting 8 months. It is now out of guarantee.
I've binned it and bought a Samsung. I will never buy another HTC for myself or my company again.

Both my HTC Desire HD phones malfunctioned and died or nearly died.

The first bricked within a year and a half, though it started to go wrong (small things) at the 3-4 month stage. I tried to repair that one myself but ended up putting it in the bin.

I bought another, brand new, my own money, in January of this year. It was only

Welcome to the forum.

I'm sorry you had such bad experiences. I don't know where you are from, but in the EU there would be a 2 year warranty on a phone, so you should have been able to get the first one fixed under that. Was the second one new (price seems low for that), because if so that would be a clear warranty repair (needed a new motherboard from what you say).

It's hard to say more without knowing more details. If you search on any manufacturer you'll find reports of lemons, and I can tell you from experience that these are a small fraction. But I understand thoroughly how such experience puts you off a brand.

Hi,
I am using this phone from last 1.5 years. 1 month back it was waterdamaged and was not starting up. So the mobile repairing engineer changed the boot ic and since then it was working perfectly fine.
But from yesterday, it is shutting down - sometimes when I am using some application. Or sometimes even if its not being used and just kept it at my desk.
Today again I tried to charge it and that time it was continuously restarting.
The phone is not in warranty now. So any suggestions?

I don't know what repair was performed (because I can't think what a boot integrated circuit might be), but if he only replaced a component rather than the whole motherboard then it's really quite like that you are seeing the effect of water damage to a different component. To be honest I'd regard any phone that's had serious moisture exposure as living on borrowed time and not waste a lot of money trying to fix it.