Hello I picked up a 3g recently. It was jailbroke with pwnage and unlocked with ultrasn0w. It's running on 4.2.1 and 06.15.00.
Everything seems to be functioning ok, but battery life is pretty bad.
So I want to try and improve the battery life.
My best understanding (I am novice at best) is I should activate with S.A.M
to improve the battery life.
So if I'm on the right track with this, how should I best go about it.

I'm hoping maybe someone knowledgeable here could tell me,
should I Restore in itunes back to 4.1 then jailbreak with redsn0w (don't have access to a mac anymore) then activate/unlock with S.A.M.
I realize I can't go back from 06.15 but I think I can go back to 4.1. And if there is no advantage to staying on 4.1 then no problem, I'll be back to the same firmwares but with the S.A.M activation.
Should that help with my battery life issue?
And, am I at least barking up the right tree, or am I off target here?

Thanks to anyone who might want to help me out, and happy holidays to all.
And btw, I would probably still be trying to get j/b and unlocked the first time if not for the guidance and info from Olethros and these forums and guides.
Thanks again

One other question I have, why do I only have a Capacity of 6.9 GB and 6.3 available in my settings ,general, about?? I realize the ios and f/w files etc use some capacity, but 1.7 gigs?? Does this seem normal???? I have a couple apps installed, maybe 50-60 MB's at most. No music, videos or photo's etc....

Originally Posted by Jetmech421

battery life is pretty bad.
So I want to try and improve the battery life.
My best understanding (I am novice at best) is I should activate with S.A.M
to improve the battery life.
So if I'm on the right track with this, how should I best go about it.

I'm hoping maybe someone knowledgeable here could tell me,
should I Restore in itunes back to 4.1 then jailbreak with redsn0w (don't have access to a mac anymore) then activate/unlock with S.A.M.
I realize I can't go back from 06.15 but I think I can go back to 4.1. And if there is no advantage to staying on 4.1 then no problem, I'll be back to the same firmwares but with the S.A.M activation.
Should that help with my battery life issue?
And, am I at least barking up the right tree, or am I off target here?

Restoring with 6.15 baseband is problematic, espeically if you don't have custom IPSW.

I'd remove any passcode lock you might have added to the phone. Install & test OpenSSH and SAM on your 4.2.1 and then try to get SAM activation working right on that iOS version. Also make sure you can SSH tunnel over USB.

One of the mistakes most people make is not being prepared enough before trying SAM - going from hacktivated to legit activated is not a 1-click process and it is easy to panic and start restoring. However you can only cleanly restore custom IPSW once you have upgraded to 6.15 baseband.

Originally Posted by Jetmech421

One other question I have, why do I only have a Capacity of 6.9 GB and 6.3 available in my settings ,general, about?? I realize the ios and f/w files etc use some capacity, but 1.7 gigs?? Does this seem normal???? I have a couple apps installed, maybe 50-60 MB's at most. No music, videos or photo's etc....

The OS partition takes somewhere between 600Mb and 1GB depending on iOS version and model. Launching Cydia and going to Manage->Storage gives you a better idea of where your disk space is allocated to. (I'm not sure if that is present in the 4.2.1 version of Cydia - it is absent on my iPad running 4.2.1 - however I have this option on my iPhone running iOS 4.1 and a slightly older version of Cydia)

For example my iPhone 4 has a system partition of 889M
The private partition is where your apps, photos and so on are installed.

If you used a custom IPSW you downloaded from the internet, some of these have increased the System partition to 1.5 GB - which has absolutely no value at all for the average user). You want a system partition that is 80-85% full. You should evaluate this once Cydia has performed it's first-run and moved some files to the private partition.