[General Topics] MatthewDaly:
So my HTC VZ6900 (Vogue) was acting up two days ago and I could tell it was a software issue and has not done any real research on the device till yesterday! Here is my story...

HTC started acting up while at school on Monday and was not doing great. I tried a soft reset but nothing worked... Booo. I tried removing the battery and waiting a few minutes and it took an entire 90 minutes + to get past the WM 6.0 screen! Once it got to the today screen the touch feature was none responsive so I could not really access anything. Soft keys worked. Couldn't get anything and the phone would not connect to the network.

Tuesday morning I took it to the Verizon store before I went to work. I had brought my old phone because I was not sure what was wrong. I personally thought it was a software problem, and figured that if that was the case Verizon would hard reset the phone or at least give me a replacement. Wrong. The clown at the desk took my phone and word for word quotes here: "Ah, yeah this thing is dead you’re going to have to get a new phone. Oh! Wait you have insurance you can pay $50 and they will give you a replacement."

I am a studying to get a PHD in electrical engineering and my gut told me this was not the case... So I said no thank you to the insurance and ask him to switch my phone to my old phone that being my old envy which still works perfect. When I went to leave they tried to take my HTC touch to which I protested and they complied. To work I go...

Well it was a quiet day so I had lots of free time and decided to Google VZ6900 problems, after about 10 minutes of searching I came across XDA-Developers! Did a little searching and saw that some people had similar problems. Figured out how to hard reset my phone (This was not a problem all of my contacts were saved to windows live!). Phone resets and it’s like brand new. I had seen these ideas of Custom ROM's and decided to do a little reading. After about 20 minutes I decided that it would not be hard to upgrade my ROM, loaded coke loader and followed the Verizon directions, 20 minutes later BAM running WM6.5 custom ROM. Hm I began to wonder, will Verizon be so nice as to activate this for me? I know they love to lock everything down so that they will get paid. I walk back to the store at 430 and proceed to wait 25 minutes to talk to a different person. I was explaining that their Tech earlier had told me the phone was broken beyond repair and that in fact he had just been lazy and refused to even attempt to fix the phone. They did not like this one bit. They told me I would have reset to the original Verizon settings. Though what he intended was that I needed to run the Verizon ROM with its own customization. So I asked the guy if he could get the other Tech who had helped me earlier to come into the conversation and he was somewhat upset at this time, but complied.

"Hey your back, oh wow this is the new Windows Mobile Cool!"

"Yeah I spent the better part of the day fixing my phone, now switch my phone back"

"Um... I do not know if I am supposed to do that. Um."

"Remember this morning when you told me to file an insurance claim for a broken phone?"

"Yeah, don’t have to do that anymore but I cannot activate an unlocked phone"

"Yes but telling me to file an insurance claim for a broken phone when it was not actually broken is insurance fraud"

"Oh... well we are not supposed to do this but I'll make an exception"

Two minutes later that had it all up and running and I was out the door without any problems.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the information I used, it saved me a great deal of time!