[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note I717] SkyStars:
1. Battery life varies strongly with usage, in CPUSpy each bar represents how much time the phone processor has spent at each speed. The more time spent at lower speeds the better for your battery life.

If you scroll to the bottom of the list the lowest speed should either be: 384 MHz or Deep Sleep

The phone only enters Deep Sleep if the phone screen is off, and no apps are calling for CPU time. This speed saves the most battery. Rogue apps could be preventing your phone from sleeping. BetterBatteryStats is a tool to help you discover these apps and either: change your usage patterns or uninstall them.

Check CPUSpy first. If Deep Sleep is not at the bottom, or its bar is relatively small then check BetterBatteryStats for the rogue app.

However even if it's in Deep Sleep if you get around the city a lot during the day the phone will be switching radio towers often, switching uses quite a bit of battery. If you stay in a single place for a while you should be able to leave it on a desk for 8 hours and find that you have lost none or almost no battery at all (Such as at night when you are sleeping).

This is a "4G" phone, carrier coverage is spotty and if you are in an area with bad reception or poor coverage, your phone's radio must switch to a higher power level to maintain a connection with the cell tower thus using more battery. 4G towers are more sparse, and therefore 4G has worse coverage compared to your previous phones.

2. You should be using the cable included with your phone. Charging cables obviously will not carry data. But data cables will do both, get yourself a good cable.

3. Don't worry about ram at all. Android has one of the finest ram management systems out there. The phone has 1 GB of ram, 200-300 MB is reserved for the kernel and kernel processes. Therefore you actually have around 700MB, the phone uses the remaining space to caches apps and other required data so that your experience is more fluid and "Lag-free". Not to mention the ram background services and apps are using. Which brings me back to my original point. Don't worry about it, fiddling with it could ruin your experience with the device and use more battery. Don't use apps to clear it, Google has already stated that this doesn't do much.

4. The original rom is your best bet if you want all of the features of the phone. Cyanogenmod is your second choice, Cyanogenmod does not have S-pen support and some of the services provided from Samsung. Cyanogenmod is very lightweight and is the most popular choice among all android devices.

Nightly-Built means that the rom is basically updated every night, so that you can receive the latest features and improvements. You can check every day and there will be a new update for your phone with the latest additions and fixes. However not all nightly builds are stable, but they are reliable at the moment.

5. The counter only counts when you use ODIN to flash bootloaders and kernels I believe. When most of us say "flashing" we mean flashing through ClockWorkMod or CWM for short. CWM does not advance the counter I believe. There are no reports of anyone being denied warranty because of the counter. Do not flash the counter reset, this does count as a "flash" and it is still detectable by AT&T.