I use an app called Astro on my stock dhd, it has a task killer which kills most apps even sense, I don't have a pc and read bad things about rooting with a Mac.
Has anyone hear successfully rooted a dhd with a Mac?

I'll start off with an analogy: You have things on your desk right? They're quick and easy to access, but you don't always need to use them. Imagine your desk had too much stuff on it, and you needed to put something else on it. Now you'd normally put one or two things in a drawer to clear space for said item. That's exactly how Android is supposed to work. By using a task killer, you're constantly putting everything into your drawer and having to get it out of the drawer to use it. Sounds like a lot of effort? Well that's exactly what you're doing to your phone.

Android/Linux has two different types of app states - 'Running' and 'Cached'. Apps that are 'Cached' are in memory, but do not use any other resources, and is kept there so that they boot up faster. This is done with every application until the memory is full, and If another application needs more memory than free available, the Linux kernel kills apps based on their priority (Lowest first):



Now obviously you need power to kill the apps, and this is where the problem lies. It takes more CPU power to kill the apps and reload them back into memory than it does to just leave it there. Android's native memory management is pretty much instant, and the end-user will not notice it happening. On top of that, you can be assured you aren't killing a vital part of the system (Keyboard, google apps) and creating issues for yourself. Now using a task killer isn't all bad - There can be games and poorly coded apps (Dolphin Browser HD) that never reach this 'Cached' state and constantly use CPU power. These apps should be killed.

The problem with using task killers is that once you've killed the task, you are left with free, useless memory, and in turn use more power to load the parts of the app that otherwise would have still been in memory. I'll leave you with the #1 rule of Android: Free memory is wasted memory.