Started off Loving Phone, Now it Does Nothing but Lag & Battery Dies... Help Needed!

I am not sure WHAT the hell I did to this phone, maybe it is because I rooted the phone? I use the phone's features obviously like the Wifi, and Launcher Pro and Handcent, etc. And of course have some games downloaded and a few other applications that I have on my previous Blackberry Bold.

But lately I will used Advanced Task Killer and kill a few apps and then have about 100M memory remaining. But the letters when I am typing won't even appear on the screen or keep up with my typing. The text messages take sometimes 4-5 seconds to load, it is just really been LAGGING. I am tempted to trade it in for the Droid X that a good friend of mine has because I am almost ready to throw it across the room at times!

I use a weather application with the flip clock, I use Gmail of course, a battery application, Advanced Task Killer, basically all of the Droid applications that I have ran in the past, etc.

So in a nutshell the problems are:

1. The battery life drains from 100% to 40% literally in a few hours of minimal usage. Not from heavy browsing or from talking on the phone for that few hours - just checking the text messages every few minutes, etc. I was okay having a sh-tty battery life phone for all of the features but having to connect it to the charger literally 4-5 times throughout the day seems absurd.

2. The sluggish and lagging operating system. Maybe there is a memory setting that I have wrong or something along those lines - but I am not sure why the phone has slowed down so much since I first activated it just a week ago. The phone's physical keyboard always kept up, Handcent never was a black screen for 5-6 seconds before displaying the texts, etc.

EXAMPLE: just tried sending a picture message to a friend... I typed my friend Crystal's name in the To: field and counted 11 seconds until it finally appeared with her name in my contact list to select. Why the 11-second delay?????

Any thoughts or am I forced, again, to go back to Blackberry. -

 

Jhalsey- thanks for the great respponse and everyone who responded I have already made small adjustments that make me want to keep it over my Blackberry anyway thank god. I unrooted the phone and removed ATK which immediately helped following up with a battery pull.

Anyway are SETCPU and Auto Memory Manager both apps I can download free in the Markey? And also how do you delete specific apps? Also how do you turn off global roaming? Lastly, does the extended battery happen to work or fit I should say with the Verizon shell/holster?

 

How do you set your contacts to only show your phone contacts for whatever reason my contacts have about twelve hundred because it is including my Facebook friends. Now I see why it is taking so long to load up a specific contact!

Also- I may go ahead and re-root the phone even though I swear it seems to be running better after I unrooted it but it could be all in my head.