iOS 4.2 [How To] Get the most of your iPhone3G on 4.2.1 (speed & features)

Hellow everyone!
A few of you may remember me.. ive been gone for a bit now travelling around the world.. and now im back here..

While Travelling around i noticed that alot of people i met, complaining about the iphone3G speed on 4.2.1. Some want to use the "unlockable" features like Background without using Winterboard, of use the Multitask/Fastswitch feature.
But activate them will usually cause them bothering with a slow and sloppy phone.
So i decided to put my old iphone3G out of the Trash and see what we can do.
I was able to use every "not 3G" feature on my device without experiencing any kind of laags or sloppyness. Its runs just perfectly.. great start-up times, and great usage while on Springboard etc.

And now ill tell you what you can do, you may already know some of the features / tweaks you can do, but i was unable to find a thread that focus on the iphone3G and on all features in one Thread. I wont focus on the "Basics" like how to SSH into your device and how to Jailbreak your device. If you dont know how to do that.. search the Forum, tons of threads in here.
So lets get started.


1. Requirements:
iPhone3G on 4.2.1
SSH-Program like WinSCP (Windows) or Cyberduck (MacOS)
latest redsn0w
WLan

2. Lets go!
So i would HIGHLY! recommend you, using a fresh 4.2.1 restored iPhone.
You may have done the iPad 06.15 Baseband unlock and you need now a CustomFW to restore, and avoid an error while restoring. Yes you CANT kick out or iPhone out of the RecoveryLoop on 4.2.1 thats why you need the CustomFW and i uploaded you one that works perfectly.

Click meee

Please note that you need redsn0w in ordner to Restore to a Custom FW!
Open Redsn0w point to your Official 4.2.1 IPSW and just check "boot into pwned DFU Mode" after its done, you can Restore to my CustomFW with iTunes.

Once your iPhone is restored and youre on 4.2.1 Jailbreak with the latest redsn0w. Feel free to use every features that can be enabled like Multitasking and Wallpapers. I promise you it WILL run perfectly. But make sure not to activate the ipad baseband button, since youre already on that.

So your iPhone is Jailbroken now, every feature is enabled and youre probably now like

youre right.. but were not done yet so calm down!
Before going to Cydia, make sure you go the the Settings.app and deactivate the automatic Lockdown.
And also here we come to our 1st improvment in Speed.
Deactivate EVERY Spotlight searching options.

Make sure everything is unchecked.

Once youre done with those 2 steps, open Cydia, choose what you are..
(Developer) make sure you click the "Complete Update" option once Cydia is done. After your device is updated with Cydia, open Cydia again and install OpenSSH you can also already install SBSettings if you want to, but you dont have to yet.

So your device has restarted now, and you prepared your iPhone for more Tweaking and optimizing.
Connect via SSH to your iPhone.

Welcome to your iPhone File-System.
Our first step now is making your iPhone and your Springboard DRAMATICALLY! faster, by deleting Shadows. By activating the Background / Wallpaper option, Apple / your iPhone also activates some Shadow effects for a "nice" look.. but thats one of the reasons why you think your iPhone may die in a few mins. because its sooo slow.

So change to the following directory on your iPhone:

Once youre there delete the following Shadow Files.

Congratulations, youre one step ahead for a fast iPhone now.

Next up we remove some LaunchDaemons, you may already heard about it, and know what it is. But its a step we have to do, it will increase your start-up time alot and also free's alot of Ram. On my old-crumpy iPhone i get about 51-60mb of Free Ram.



So please change to your iPhone directory:

And delete the following .plist files.

You can delete the additionals too if you dont use the features that i wrote in the Boxes.

So you now have Deleted and Removed everything that is causing a laggy Device with the new Features.

Please restart your iPhone now! Restart it by Shuting it down via SBSettings or the Normal Shutdown.. you may notice a laag while shuting down, thats normal, if your iphone get stuck.. to a force restart with the home+Sleep button.. please notice that after a force-restart the iPhone does on its Boot-Up a FileSystem / Disk check, so you may see a longer Start-Up as usuall. If you want an actuall Boot-Up speed test, you have to shutdown the iPhone normally.

When your iPhone is back on, you will see the improvments. Switching Pages on the Springboard is laag-free as it has to be. Folders, and Multitasking works just perfectly, i can run up to 4 .apps without having any problems at all.
You can now Set-Up your iPhone with iTunes as usuall. Make sure you use the option "use as new iPhone" and dont install a Backup.. because that will cause the iphone to "reinstall" old settings.. and it might be laggy and slow again.

Oh and ye, just on a side-note.. if you want to play online via GameCenter, you can do it.. ive done a great Guide a few Month ago, just have a look at it.

http://www.ifans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322817




3. Fix Multitasking-Springboard Crash
So when using Multitasking and you wanna switch trough the different apps, you will notice that your Springboard will crash.
To avoid this, please head over to the Thread of my Friend xXrkidXx who made a good and short Guide how to fix it.

Click mee!


4. Links & Credits
Latest redsn0w
iPhone3G 4.2.1 CustomFW to Restore on Baseband 06.15
Guide: GameCenter on iPhone3G running 4.2.1
Additional GameCenter Patcher-Credits goes to shani_08
Multitasking Fix Guide by xXrkidXx

** A sticky would be awesome, lovely Moderators **

great guide. but please mention that removing all the shadow and text effects from the wallpaper will make them loom as ugly as hell. the shadows are there to make the wallpaper look nice no matter what.

cant confirm that. it looks good to me.

wait, how did you keep the white text and not the grey one?

also, if your using a wallpaper with lots of colors, it will look worse. it happened on my old 2G MC.

Well i used serveral Wallpapers and it looks all time good.
You know, if you want speed then you cant complain about "good looking". It still looks decent, you can keep the shadows if theyre important to you, but then you got a sloppy device.

And White Fonts.. uhm.. i didnt changed the Font - Color at all. Always has been white

It will only show up because of winterboard.

wrong. i dont use winterboard, i hate it and its not installed

A couple of things-

1) As viperGTS said, Wallpapers will look like sh!t without overlays (especially the icon shadows, which ironically slows the device down the most), however only the colorful/bright ones will look off. To demonstrate (I'm running whited00r, but it's basically a clone of iOS 4, and you have an option to disable icon shadows)-



^I prefer number one

2) Make sure to tell people NOT to enable multitasking through redsn0w, you have to add another line into the NXXXX.plist/MXXXX.plist (opengles-2) for it to work. Otherwise, it'll just crash when you open the switcher in an app.

3) Grey text is caused by WB

4) Great job on this!

Well the wallpaper just get a bit bad when you use a super bright and white wallpaper.., but as i said before its about speed and not heaving a super nice and sweet look. If you take a more dark wallpaper it just looks normal.
The openGLS2 is true, but i said in the first sentence that i dont go into the basics.. but i will add it as a little note..
and 3rd ye.. thats what i meant to say.. the grey font is caused by WB and not the white one

Still, you might want to include that you should use a darker wallpaper when deleting that specific shadow. I personally can't stand the darker wallpapers, it just doesn't feel right- too basic. Also, you can tell the difference, even with a somewhat darker wallpaper, try the stock water waves one.