BitPim

[Jon8RFC]

If you're confident with tinkering with your phone, BitPim is a great program for the phones it supports. Verizon is my service provider and the thing I use BitPim for most frequently is to backup and add ring tones (even custom ones, like an mp3) since Verizon doesn't have a native system for adding ring tones and they insist on you purchasing through them. I'll cut about 30 seconds from a song, tv show, movie, or video game and add it to my phone. Pretty handy!
Welcome to BitPim

I've been poking around the service menus of my cell phones (I typically stick to LG) since my VX6000 in 2003 and using QPST, LG Downloader, BitPim, and sometimes perform firmware updates on my own. Just be careful, because I bricked my VX8100 and VX9900 once each when tinkering with something I wasn't familiar with...but my account history with Verizon since 1997 (Primeco, at the time) has benefitted me when I bricked my phones doing something the warranty didn't cover. There are some great things that can be done with these programs, or even through the service menus--many years ago, when picture messaging first came out, I would navigate through the service menu and raise my data rate and would send pictures in half the time. With the new networks, it's used the faster data rate by default, but there's always something to customize or improve.

Just don't poke around with anything in BitPim (or other programs) that sounds unfamiliar to you, because you might be SOL if you screw it up and your service provider doesn't want to help. I don't have time to answer questions personally, but Google is a great tool to help find answers to your questions, and BitPim's website is how I learned to use the program to add/backup ring tones.