The BlackBerry TourGuide

Read the various forums online and many of the same myths continue to persist and be passed on and people continue to believe them. In reading a thread about the most recent leak for the Tour where nearly two pages were wasted with this garbage was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak so here they are, myths and facts about updates.

MYTH #1: It’s always best to completely wipe your BlackBerry with J_Cmdr or a similar tool before installing an OS update:

The supposed rationale for this is the idea that you need to clean off the junk that may be left by older OS builds when certain files are not overwritten by the update process.

FACT: The update process does this for you automatically. First it backs up your database. Then it does a backup of your third party apps. Next it WIPES THE PHONE. Then it installs the boot rom and does a fresh install of the new OS on the clean phone. Then it reboots the phone (this is the part that seems to take forever), and installs the third party apps from the backup. Finally it restores the database from backup and reboots the phone again.

FACT: Doing this manually when your Blackberry is perfectly healthy serves no useful purpose whatsoever, and in fact can cause problems for the less tech oriented users out there. The only times you need to wipe the phone are:

1. When you have been dealing with Hybrid OS builds (OS’s comprised of modules from several OS builds), either moving to or moving away from, since this does indeed sometimes confuse the app loader.

2. If you have bricked your phone to such a degree that when you try to install the new OS the boot loader does not respond or when the DM merely overwrites the modules but does not fix a corrupted boot rom. I’ve done at least a hundred OS updates and only had this happen 4 times, two of which were with a defective Tour I had to get replaced.

MYTH #2: You need to remove the old OS’s from your computer before installing an update.

I’ve heard different versions of this including that this is needed all the time and that this is needed when you install an unofficial/leaked OS and/or another carriers OS.

FACT: The ONLY time this is the case is if you are dealing with HYBRID OS’s. Before they were invented people were installing leaked OS’s all the time by merely removing/renaming the vendor.xml file (and DM 4.7 and later may require you to disconnect from the Internet). I’ve never done this and heave never had a problem. I had 8-9 different OS’s for my Storm on my computer when the official .148 came out and the only reason I removed them was to save space.

I’ll update this post as I come up with more of these,