Android phone troubleshooting

[mp170.6]

I'm trying to fix an older HTC Android 2.3.5 phone.  The touch screen becomes intermittently unresponsive such that I can't hang the phone up, apps crash, hang, or just don't work properly, plus some other behavior is really weird...the speed test apps I have installed can't determine download or upload speeds anymore, just the ping times.  When pressing the Home button, the boot screen sometimes appears for about a minute as if I rebooted.

 

On Monday, it never rang for an incoming call and the voicemail notification and inbound text messages were delayed for hours.  The last two days, it's been choking on all inbound and outbound text messages, requiring several attempts to send or receive. 

 

Restarting the phone provides very temporary improvement.  A factory reset resolves some (or all) of the problems, but only for a week or two. 

 

What would you suggest?

[nate]

Are there any software updates available?  Are you using any third party software with it?

 

Honestly some bit of the hardware could be failing and causing the entire OS to hang because of it.  Maybe check xda-developers.com forums for the phone you have, even post the question if you can't find anything.

[stevestevens]

get a blackberry

[mp170.6]

No software updates available.  I rooted the phone to uninstall bloatware.  The phone's behavior before and after me rooting and uninstalling some things is exactly the same.

 

How do you guys differentiate between software and hardware problems?  I really miss the PC days where I could physically remove hardware components to isolate problems. 

[nate]

The fact that you factory reset and also rooted and removed bloatware points to hardware.

 

Could have failing ram, cpu, etc.

 

Do you have a removable SD card in it?  If so, remove it and see if that helps.

[mp170.6]

Oh really?  I was leaning toward software because the factory reset is at least temporarily effective. 

 

Usually that doesn't work with consistency when it's hardware related, but then again, I'm thinking along the lines of a PC.  That might not be helpful here.  I'll try removing the SD card. 

[nate]

Missed the part about it working ok after the factory reset.  Could still be hardware.  Flash memory has a shelf life, basically once you write to the same block so many times it becomes unusable.  Could be causing the issue.  Either way that is a really old device.  Probably can replace it with $100 after searching through craigslist.

[mp170.6]

Why did you root it?

 

Just curious. 

 

To get rid of the bloatware. 

[Section517]

Since the phone is rooted, have you tried flashing a third party ROM?  

 

I'm wondering if you accidentally removed a system app(s) which could be causing all your phone issues.