you are on stock - the custom kernals are much better - everything including battery life is so much better

but dont touch the ics stuff yet - in a few weeks i think the hard brick bug will be fully dealt with

got the ota update this morning, after being VERY patient and not putting custom rom on. only rooted and nothing else.
so i happily clicked on the update to android 4, fearing no possibility of anything going wrong.
so it downloaded the update and began installing, looked fine. then it finished with no problems and restarted........only it didn't start lol.
stuck on booting screen for over an hour, so had to eventually give it up and take the battery out.
what a palaver. gotta go through trying to recover now

so warning to anyone else doing this. do a full backup before hand.

I got similar - hid my GB root with voodoo rootkeeper before doing OTA. The update d/l was fine but failed to apply correctly (crapped out midway leaving my GB install OK). Don't know why but I tried again and this time it seemed to work but after it finished and rebooted, it stuck on the samsung logo.

I downloaded the UK CPW 4.0.3 firmware and used PC Odin to apply it - all ok and it restored/upgraded all my apps and data etc automatically.

I then re-rooted using cwm.zip and su_busybox_installer.zip and I'm all rooted & booted.

Here's my current setup:

#1-[ROM]AOKP Build 38 (haven't tried 38.1)
#2-[ROM]ParanoiDroid v0.2 (great work)
Last resort: LiquidSmooth v2.2

#1-[KERNEL] Thor's v11 (v12 is available today)
#2-[KERNEL] Franco's r5 (r6 sucks)
Last resort: cm9 nightly kernel

#1-[GOVERNOR] PegaSuq
#2-[GOVERNOR] LulzActive
Last resort: SmartassV2

-[Max CPU] 1.6GHz 1,400mV
-[Min CPU] 0.1GHz 800mV

I'm running my own optimized Apex Launcher. I can provide .apk for anyone interested.
I'm using the Miui Lockscreen (beautiful) instead of stock/aokp.
I have thepsyntyst's screen transitions [MOD] so far Rubik and PsnShift are my favourite.
On AOKP I've pre-organized my settings (after much experimenting).

I'm *lucky* enough to have a poop quality N7000, so I had to tweak figures for stability, and reduce the voltage wherever I saw possible to increase battery life. This layout should increase it by 15-25% over stock ics. But it should be just as fast, if not faster. Processor wear down is pretty much impossible on this settings:
1.74GHz - 1500mV
1.66 - 1500
1.6 - 1400
1.5 - 1325
1.4 - 1225
1.3 - 1150
1.2 - 1050
1.1 - 1025
1.0 - 1000
0.9 - 975
0.8 - 975
0.7 - 950
0.6 - 925
0.5 - 900
0.4 - 900
0.3 - 875
0.2 - 850
0.1 - 800
50MHz - 800
25MHz - 800

All ICS kernels/roms (inc Official Samsung) really suck for battery life. People can't pin-point the exact reason but its horrid. Screen On Time is usually about ~4.5-5 hours on stock Gingerbread. Most ICS kernels give you about ~3-3.5 hours. With the settings above the max I had was 4 hours. So its better than the alternatives, but its not really stellar. Part of the reason could be the rom (memory leaks etc?). But I think its more likely that my battery's experienced too much wear since October.

P.S. Some have also Overclocked the GPU (use Voltage Control App) to 267MHz @900mV...and the results seem to tie with Tegra3 performance. Though you have to be careful, the cpu is designed to handle alot of heat/speed...not so much the gpu.

could you please point me in the direction of where to download all those files please. And are there any noob firendly instructions out there too? I know a bit but not a lot, and the bits I do aren't working so a step by step would be good if one exists.
my note was not being recognised by odin only by adb in recovery mode, and not in 'download mode'. I tried a zip file that I put on an sd card which looked promising, thought it was an official rom, got it from xda, but it told me to go away because it wasn't signed
I'll be buggered if I can find the official ones anywhere. Samsung hides them well. If a Gingerbread rom is available too I might just
use that. Save the hassle for when I have more time to sort it all. I'm guessing my phone is one with the dreaded !problem' that bricks it when updating. I did think the official ota update wouldn't be a problem though. Never bothered to do any tampering except to gain root access and that was it.

Sorry for the extra long post, but I will just say that using my n900 again has been great. only niggle is the web browsing isn't quite as fast, and there's not an app available for a couple of things.

just found a place that looks promising. I'm gonna give that a go, sticking it on an sd

http://www.samsdroid.com/2012/06/n70...ingdom_01.html

Go find all stock firmwares here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1424997

Until Samsung corrects the emmc bug, I an using the SpeedMod kernel: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1673072

Once your Note is rooted, best choice imho is using Mobile Odin Pro, to flash firmware on device without external computers, and automatically inject root and superuser into the flashed firmware.

I'm losing the will to live here lol.

Every place I find to download the official 4.0.3 firmware takes me to hotfile, where it kindly tells me that I am already downloading this file and can't do another one.
I am NOT currently downloading, else I wouldn't be trying to get it. GRRRRrrrrrr.
Hulk mad.
lol

Want latest LQ3 firmware? Get it from my computer from http://www.justbeamit.com/7ba34
I'll keep it running for a few hours :-)

thank you very much. I will have a try. Been trying to dowload that stock firmware still. finally tricked it in to downloading to my n900 by using 3g connection. It still thinks anything over wifi in the house is already downloading. It's going, but slowly. Will try that first then move on to other things.

Damn. guess I was too late and missed it lol.

Is that something that would work anyway if all can use is the standard android system recovery (3e)?

I'll figure this out eventually.