[HD2 General] Sentinel196:
Hi all,

First of all, I wish to preface this by saying how appreciative I am of the assistance and wealth of knowledge I have found on this forum. Without it, I must say I would have been pretty disappointed with my HD2 n its purely stock form. Much like the appstore is the iPhone's primary selling point, I believe the customisable nature of WinMo devices is their main selling point and is the reason I chose to purchase an HD2 over an iPhone (other than the cost/Tech Specs) of course. This thread is in no way intended to take away from the amazing work our chefs do!

I would also appreciate if any "If you don't like customising, why are you here?" comments off this thread also as that is not in any way what this is about. god knows I have destroyed enough PC BIOSes and mobile phones trying to customise them or tweak them for the maximum achieveable performance before it all became so mainstream.

I know this kind of a question is going to get people into "attack the n00b" mode really quickly, but i feel it is a legitimate question which could spark some insightful and intelligent discussion.

I was just wondering what your honest opinions are regarding the use of cooked ROMs.

At present I am using an up to date stock ROM with many added tweaks including CHT1.7.1 and the tweaked graphics drivers and am more than happy with the way the phone looks and operates. there is no software that is missing from the stock ROM which I feel would benefit me in any way and the phone seems to operate quickly and seamlessly and so far I have not experienced any reliabillity issues.

With a long standing background in the electronics and software development field, I have always been quite a strong believer in the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" principal, but as I consider you guys and girls to be an intelligent bunch with a wealth of cumilative knowledge, I am interested in your opinions on the cooked VS customised stock ROM debate.

From what I can gather the benefits of a well developed cooked ROM such as EnergyROM or CleanEX ROM are as follows:

Menus are neatly organised and catagorised.

Extra software which is considered to be useful is preloaded.

Interface is tweaked (albiet usually no moreso than it can be with a few mods loaded on to a stock ROM)

UI and animation speed improvements.

The arguements against are as follows:

Risk (however low it is) of bricking your device

Compatabillity with different devices

Warrenty is voided (even though this can in most cases be avoided by flashing bck to a stock SPL)

Reliance on one person, or just a few people for updates rather than a huge company.

Personally, I have never used a cooked ROM, but I have been considering installing the EnergyROM on to my HD2 s it is the most closely matched cooked ROM to the way I have customised my stock ROM, however as I am currently quite happy with the way I have my stock ROM set up, I am wondering if there are any extra benefits that I have missed. It would almost seem that in my case, I am better off just sticking with the tweaked stock ROM as it serves all my needs and scouring pretty much any thread relating to a cooked ROM, I seem to stumble upon a LOT of bugs (hich have usually been fixed in subsequent releases).

To me it would seem that a lot of the time, the appeal of cooked ROMs is the "Elite" and "Geeky coolness" factor rather than actual functionallity.

Discuss....