Help with jailbroken 3g iPhone. Please!

[L2H]

I have a jailbroken iPhone that I bought off of eBay. I know nothing about jailbreaking and such and have not had any problems with it for over a year now. All of a sudden, I am no longer getting a text notification (sound/vibrate or pop up) when receiving new texts. I only thing I can think of that I did to the phone recently was to load Cydia the other night and it prompted me to do 4 "Essential Upgrades". Can this be the root of my problem? Can that be undone? Or can I do something else to bring back the notifications? Please help!

[screamforme02]

try a hard reset. and worse case try a restore back to 3.0 or even 4.1