Yeah, when I was dealing with the new cable TV box, the Comcast person I was talking to said the problem was with the splitter, and that I should get an amplified one. But then we got the cable box working so I never did anything with the splitter.

Maybe I'll call Comcast and ask them to give me an amplifier. Are they separate from the splitter? Or are there amplified splitters?

ETA: OK, my boss says amplifiers are separate from splitters, and that different splitters have differing signal loss, which is printed on the splitter. Maybe just a better splitter would help.

How many splits do you have?

Just one in my apartment. Originally I was the only one with Comcast in the building, so there are few if any in the building outside of my apartment.

I would say, it's something that Comcast needs to look at. You don't want to buy an amplifier without being able to test what the signal strength is at the end of the line. If you boost it too much, you can have problems too. And if the signal is weak before the split, you would prefer the boost be done closer to the source. One of my digital cable boxes had a menu item for service or test or some such. And it showed the signal level of the cable line. Quite handy to call the cable provider and say, "um, my signal is -20db, and I'm having trouble tuning stations". If you can find that feature, call and ask "what is the acceptable signal strength I should be seeing at my cable box". Rather than saying "I have -20db" and they say, "oh, that's in the perfect range...blah blah blah".

(yes, I have a minor distrust for cable companies, sorry. Time Warner really did a number on me)

All cable companies seem to have a subset of evil people working for them.

Sometimes it seems like the reverse.

A co-worker sold me his old LG LS670 smartphone for $5, and I'm enjoying using it as a wi-fi device.

It has very limited storage on the phone itself, so I bought a 32GB storage card.

However, I really want to play around more, and every online option I find to root it says it succeeds, but it does not.

I want access to the root. Is that too much to ask?

Sigh.

ETA: Android 2.3.3 Build ZVJ.47B56B46

When you say it doesn't work, what does that mean? What are you doing to test whether it works?

Simply rooting it doesn't do very much, unless your rooting method also installs certain programs that let you actually use that root. Try downloading SuperSU from the play store. If the program works, it should then be able to grant root access to other programs, so you could for example use ES File Explorer's Root Explorer mode to do whatever you want in the file system.

If SuperSU doesn't work then I don't know. I could help you navigate the XDA forums, but I don't know anything about your phone. And rooting methods are very specific to individual phones.

Did you try this guide? Apparently you have to downgrade your ZVJ phone to the ZVD baseband in order to root it. You can then upgrade back up again if you want. He goes into detail.

I use connectbot terminal to test, and so far haven't been able to get into superuser mode or use sudo. I am also still locked out of the file system folder that i want to go to to edit a setting for one of my programs.

Gris, I was hoping to not downgrade, but I suspect I will have to.

How hard is GIMP to learn and use in a few days to create three samples of graphics?

I don't have much graphic creation (well, not much of any) but I learn fast. Is there a better (free) program?

Any advice?