Someone's got to educate me on all this rooting business.. I'm lost
A few weeks back I decided to try Froyo. For me, rooting was really a minor side-effect. I used this as a guide:
Stock 2.1 to 2.2 Froyo Step By Step installation - Page 2 - Droid Forum - Verizon Droid & the Motorola Droid Forum
From the perspective of a casual user, I didn't do anything specific to root--it was transparently included in the ROM. And--other than playing around in Terminal Emulator and seeing that I had root access (i.e., I could view the highest level of the phone's file system)--where it had impact was when I installed Overclock Widget, and then, SetCPU. Because these programs have root (i.e., super-user) access, they can raise or lower clock speed.
Again...you install SetCPU, and...so what? Where things get interesting is when you install a custom kernel, that sets the range of possible clock speeds (the Droid is natively underclocked at...550MHz, correct?). But because you now have a new kernel (say it goes from 125MHz to 800MHz), you can run the Droid a bit faster than stock (or a lot faster if you want to try a kernel with a higher maximum).
So for me, the big payoff on "root" was that I could (a) install a custom kernel, and (b) more precisely control Droid clock speed. Ironically, I mostly underclock (e.g,. lower clock speed when the screen shuts off) to conserve battery life. For someone else, the goal may be to run the puppy at 1.25GHz and see how high their Quadrant benchmark score can go!
On that note: I have to say it's quite a rush to see that the stock Droid on 2.1 gets a score of about 350 on Quadrant, while a Droid overclocked on Froyo can get a score 3 or 4 times higher. Very cool.
-Matt