WiFi Only Rooting and CPU Overclock

Well, as my first post on this blog, it only seems fitting that I post about one of the first things I did with my WiFi Xoom, rooting.

Bringing my baby home, isn't she beautiful?

Being brand new to Android, I was cautiously excited to unlock the potential of my new toy. I spent tons of time in the first few days of ownership reading anything and everything I could about Android, the Xoom, and rooting. The first day of the WiFi's release, the devs had an adb root release. A few days after that, a one-click root was released. Being new to Android, I was also new to the adb method of communicating with any device, and I was worried. Naturally, I thought the one-click method was going to be the best for me due to my lack of experience. I spent a couple more days reading about the one-click method and realized that the one-click for the WiFi Xoom was not working as expected. At first, I wanted to wait until the one-click method was stable. However, my excitement got the best of me. I really wanted a boot animation and I decided to jump the gun and see what kind of skills I really have.

First things first, setup. I had a pretty good handle on what I needed. I used the links in the threads I read and downloaded SDK and Moto drivers. During install, SDK pushed me to download Java. Once Java was done, SDK continued its install. In my case, SDK installed into Program Files on the C drive, you want to move SDK to the root of the C drive. Then, I located the proper WiFi root files, downloaded them, and moved them to platform-tools in SDK. I used the Tiamat 1.1.6 kernel. With all of the setup out of the way, I was ready to get moving.



SDK on the C: Drive with Windows XP
Like I said, being new to Android, I was full of anxiety. I read and re-read the instructions and watched a video on how to run it all. After working up the courage, I entered Debug mode, connected my Xoom, and typed in the first command line. Then the second, then the third. Boom, unlocked, awesome. At this point, a lot of my worries had been washed away with excitement; everything had gone to plan so far. Then I remembered I cleared all of my data with the first three lines. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable. I am glad I rooted early on, before I had spent hours customizing my home screens and collecting free apps.

Yay for our Debug friend!

After the ups and downs of unlocking and losing all of the stored data, it was time for the real challenge, rooting. I brought the site back up and, one by one, copied the lines of code into the cmd prompt. With every line, I was holding my breath until the cmd prompt was ready for the next input. Being the nervous wreck that I am, I was trying to follow the video at the same time as rooting. Unfortunately for me, my laptop is 6 years old and decided to bog down on me in the middle of rooting process. No effect on the cmd prompt and pushing files, just took a few years off my own life as I continued on. After what seemed like forever, I finally made it to the last line, "adb shell". I took a ginormous breath, typed it in, and hit enter. All the cmd prompt outputted was "#". I had no idea what to expect, I couldn't watch the video, and I didn't read up on what would happen at the end of the process, I was clueless. I made a huge assumption and guessed that it worked, I disconnected my Xoom and looked for Super User. Sure enough, it was there, what a joyous occasion! We have root! Finally my stomach felt like it was back in the correct place.

My Precious!

Since my driving force for rooting was changing the boot animation, that was the very first thing I did. I quickly downloaded a file browser and dropped the new animation into system/media. Shut her down, fired her up, and voila! No more lame honeycomb boot animation. After trying another one, I finally settled on the retro BIOS boot animation.

Big thanks to ihtfp69 over at XDA for the awesome animation.

From there, overclock time. I downloaded the overclock app of my choice and opened it up. For a while I sat there thinking to myself, "Do I really want to OC? Is this safe?". In the end, I didn't overclock that night. After reading more the following day, I came home and took the plunge. I maxed out the overclock at 1.504 GHz and I couldn't be happier. This thing is a beast overclocked and I am very happy I did.


Just slide the bar to the right, could it get any easier?
Over the next few hours I watched my battery temps like a hawk. I knew what they were before overclocking and was expecting to see them climb well above the stock levels. After some thorough abuse from browsing, I was pleasantly surprised to see the temps maxing out in the low to mid 80s F.


Why can't it be that temp outside?

In the end, everything was a whole lot easier than I was expecting. It was a roller coaster for sure but I wouldn't have it any other way. I am very happy that I took the "long" adb route of unlocking and rooting over the one-click method. I now have hands on experience with pushing files and, as far as I am concerned, that is invaluable information. If I have any future issues, I have the knowledge to push the stock files back over and start from the beginning. I highly recommend that anyone considering rooting their Xoom, use the adb method over one-click.