[Captivate General] The.Se7enth:
Nope. Don't feel their insurance policies are worth it. You spend more money on the insurance policy in total, even if it's month-to-month, than you would on a brand new contractless phone. Besides, I had only made $120 from fixing up three ancient computers (so ancient they actually had ISA slots and DIMM SD-RAM memory -- one was even a Pentium II), and only had $50 by the time I bought the phone which was a couple months later. My $50 went towards the phone and a pack of screen protectors, while my mom covered the upgrade fee. Couldn't afford the insurance policy even if we wanted to.

But I do greatly appreciate the encouragement. I'll give it a go in a bit, and try out flashing Serendipity. I'll follow the official instructions from their own website though, because I read this on their FAQ:

"Never use ROM Manager. EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER!"

RadioShack replaced the phone the first time, but the manager there said after replacing it once, the warranty was thus void. I'm not sure if profanity is allowed here, but you can figure out which word I wanted to reply to him. It's eight letters long, starts with bull.

I've read posts on AT&T forums saying if the phone's bricked or can't be repaired by user methods though, especially if it's rooted, that they won't honor the warranty at all and will consider it user error and that you're out of luck. Even people who tried to upgrade to 2.2 stock had issues with that. But I dunno.

Anyways, my machine works perfectly for everything else. Before the repair, when I tried to upgrade? It was a fresh install. I had just reformatted it because it was performing sluggish before and I decided I wanted a single-boot installation instead of having my old dual-boot of Windows 7 and XP. It's now just XP for the time being, seeing as how the hardware's limited and I want to get the best out of it for gaming (I can run 7 with ease, but it uses more resources than XP, thus games don't run as well).

I realize earlier I may have come off as implying the upgrade to 2.2 process was difficult. I don't mean it was "difficult" by any means necessary. It was simply a plug the phone in, let all the drivers install, unhook and put in download mode, hook up again for more drivers. Restart phone, start up kies, hook up phone, and click "Upgrade phone" button. Accept the terms of service or whatever, and wait. Upgrade starts, phone flips into download mode on it's own, restarts a couple times, and voila, you're on 2.2. I thought it was a piece of cake. My issue is that regardless of how easy it was, it still ended up rather broken because all those applications were missing, on top of the fact the Settings panel was also gone, leaving me unable to perform a factory reset.

I have one last question. If I do somehow manage to get these drivers to work again (without reformatting, which I don't have the time to do), should I have the SIM card out while flashing the ROM? I'm wondering, subconsciously, if somehow that may have had something to do with the upgrade to 2.2 screwing up so bad. I had the SIM card in, with all my applications installed at first. Second time, no apps or anything were installed, but the SIM card was still in.

Edit: Well aware of most forums having a "do not double post" rule, as much as I want to bump this thread with an update on the issue. But, I've restarted my computer, tried a different USB cable, uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers from numerous different sources, and still the same "fatal error" issue on "Samsung Android ADB Composite Interface". I simply cannot get that to install whatsoever, and without it, the phone isn't detected as being hooked up even by SWM, much less anything else. Seriously, what do I do? I'm not reformatting my computer, because I simply see no reason for it, but I have no other computer I can use. How do I get these drivers to install properly like they did before?