PC Companion won't update my computer past 1.6 A couple years ago, I picked up an Xperia X10i secondhand.  The phone itself has been working great; no problems whatsoever.  It's a real workhorse.  I unlocked it almost instantly, and followed some steps I Googled way back when to open it up completely.  I can't quite remember what it was, but it was supposed to root the phone.  I don't think I managed to actually root it, but it's been working fine, regardless.

Lately, I've been wanting to update the firmware on it.  Every time I use the Sony Ericsson PC Companion or Update Service, though, to try to update the firmware, it just tells me I have the latest version.

How can I go about updating this to 2.1 or higher?  Are there steps a technically-savvy, but Android newbie could follow to update the firmware?

I'm willing to blow it all away if I have to, although I'd really prefer to not have to do that.
If SE has dropped support for your device (which seems likely) your only way to upgrade your phone is to take root control over your phone and install a custom ROM, a third party version of the Android operating system.

There's a huge modding community, largely centered around the XDA developers forums. There's actually a subforum there for just your device, and the subforum for your device that you want (there's also Q&amp;A sections and whatnot) is XPERIA X10 Android Development.

There's plenty of informative threads in that forum, including:


[HOW-TO]UNLOCK bootloader for X10
Help for Newbies, All questions &amp; Answers for X10


As for what specific ROM to use, I'll leave that up to you. Your first step however should be unlocking your bootloader, getting root and getting CWM Recovery installed on your phone. When you have that installed, you can always create a complete backup of your phone, so if anything breaks you can always restore to that backup via the recovery, since the recovery remains untouched between ROM installations.

If you want to venture into rooting your phone and trying custom ROMs, I wish you good luck! It's a learning experience :)