Pardon me, I'm new to Android... With an unrooted phone, if you just kill running services, it doesn't seem to do anything beyond killing them for that session. In other words, I power off and on, and Skype and the News retrieval service and others that I previously killed are back and running.
So, if I root, will it allow me to go in and kill the bloatware permanently? I'm also getting lousy battery life, even though I got the Motorola extended battery. I can get a day out of it, but only if I don't play with it much.
The other issue I see with killing bloatware is knowing what is bloatware and what might do something I care about. Is there some place that has more detailed descriptions of what a particular running service does?
All the system apps will restart themselves almost immediately after you kill them. That's why people say not to use a task killer. Killing them and restarting them constantly uses more battery than just letting them run. If you kill the bloatware completely, you leave your phone incapable of receiving over the air updates from Verizon. The updates run as a patch, so before they run, they look for EVERY system file that came on your phone.. This includes all the stock crap like blockbuster/amazon/etc... If those files aren't there, the update won't run. So to get around this, you can either rename those files, so that they won't run, but you can change them back when you need to (most people recommend changing the extension from .apk to .bak or something easy to remember.. You can search for more on this method), or you can get Titanium Backup, which is a slick tool that allows you to do this with a GUI, as well as backup/restore all your apps, and many other things. Give it a whirl. To use Titanium Backup, you'll need to root your phone. Don't worry, you can get Z4Root (google it, there's a great thread at xda developers) for free, and it's literally two clicks to root or unroot your phone, with no risk.
You can also google (or search this forum) for lists of what applications are ok to freeze. I got rid of a good many just through common sense, the filenames are pretty easy. I don't touch anything that begins with com.motorola.xxxxx, though. Words of advice: NEVER TOUCH BACKUPASSISTANT. I say again... NEVER TOUCH BACKUPASSISTANT. I don't know for sure that it will screw up your phone, I've never tried it on mine, but the internet is full of horror stories of it bricking phones. Also, if you want to be able to send MMS, you need to leave the stock text messaging and gallery apps unfrozen.
Finally, once you've rooted and frozen all that stock bullcrap, get SetCPU. It lets you set your max/min CPU speeds based on certain conditions. For example, when my screen is off, mine are 600/300MHz. If my battery temp goes over 42C, it does the same. Get autokiller to kill unnecessary background apps. It uses the built in android processes to kill apps, and it only runs once at startup, to write your settings, then lets the android service handle everything else. Thanks to this app, my free RAM rarely drops below 200MB. Autokiller is smart enough to not kill the apps that will just restart again, and it has a built in task manager, for when you want to manually end processes.
Oh, and get quicksettings, which is the ONLY app I've found so far that gives you one touch on/off for the GPS (all the others I've tried take you to the settings menu where you can click "enable gps"), as well as the usual WiFi/bluetooth, etc... It's also got a flashlight button that lights up the whole screen, which is nice, since I haven't found an app that turns on the D2G's LED torch (except that stupid instant heart rate monitor app, which sucks). I use this to keep my data/wifi off at all times, except when I'm actively using them (I'm not important enough to need constant email notifications).
With all of these, and the BP7X extended battery (and my brightness at 25%), I can easily pull 2-3 days of light to moderate use. I regularly go 18 hours before my battery is at 50%.