help with hard reset and rooting questions

[laquirrel]

Samsung Galaxy S3 SGH-i747M Android 4.1.2 kernel version 3.0.31-1189444-user
Rogers phone Canada

Background - purchased Rogers smart phone - used condition in good shape.
I am a Pay-As-You-Go customer thru Rogers. They swapped my sim card
for me.
I don't have a data plan and I go on the internet thru my home connection or
anywhere else there is Wi-Fi.
Phone worked well. Set my own ringtone and checked it out in general.

1]Hard reset?
I put the phone online thru Kies and was told there was a firmware update,
so I went ahead and did the update.
Now when the phone rings, it is not the ringtone I assigned it. Although,
when I go into Settings>Sound>Ringtones>device Ringtone it shows the ringtone
I assigned as being the one that will play when a call comes in. I did some
searching thru Google to try to solve the problem. I followed instructions to reset
the ringtone, but it will not change. Further searching came up with possibly
hard reset for the phone could solve this problem. That possibly the firmware Update?
caused this problem? Does it sound like a hard reset is in order?

2]Rooting
This sounds like something I would like to do, but am uncertain how it affects the
Rogers Pay-As-You-Go. Does this mean I could use any company's Pay-As-You-Go
once the phone was rooted? Do I have to wait until my minutes with Rogers are finished?
Would I simply root the phone without the sim card in it? I have read some about
rooting, but found nothing to answer these questions. Possibly because not many
people operate a smart phone without a data plan. Anyway, I don't intend to get a plan
with anyone until pay-as-you-go is defunct.
One other question, what is the difference between unlocking a smartphone and rooting?

Thanks

 

[GSDer]

1. Hard Reset = Factory Reset
Typically, when you update the firmware it also does a Factory Reset (if you had to go through the phone setup after the update then it did a Factory Reset). It wouldn't hurt to do another one (other than the hassle of having to set things up the way you like them).

You could try clearing the system cache in Recovery mode.

2. I'd recommend staying away from rooting until there's some pressing reason for you to do so; and until you've done a lot of reading about it - I can't count the number of people who have screwed something up who are then desperate to get their phone working again.

In-and-of-itself rooting shouldn't affect your ability to use the pay-as-you-go program for your carrier.

Rooting the phone provides you (and other applications) system level rights: you can fiddle with system files; change/replace parts of the OS or configuration that you wouldn't normally have access to; install ad blockers; etc.

There are two kinds of unlocking:
- unlocking the bootloader allows you to flash other ROMs and load an alternate Recovery method
- carrier unlocking the phone may allow you to use it on a different carrier than it was originally purchased for. You need to check with the carrier that you want to use it on to see if it's supported AND with the carrier that you're on to see if they'll unlock it.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM 10.2 using Tapatalk 4