This guide provides a number of tips you can use to speed up your phone, and while not every tip will apply to you or your phone, you should find at least a few tips in here that will. Whether you've rooted your phone, overclocked, flashed a new ROM, or none of the above, you'll be able to take advantage of a number of the tweaks below to get your phone from sluggish and glitchy to quick and smooth.
Everyone's phone is different, too, so note that some of the more
advanced tweaks may have a bit of error. I've experienced good things with these tweaks on my Nexus 5.Users with newer phones (like the Droid Turbo or Note 4) may not
need these tips as much, but I've heard from several sources that even
speedy phones like those have benefited from these tips, so they're
worthlooking around with no matter what phone you have.
If You Haven't Rooted Your Phone
There are a lot of great tweaks out there for rooted phones, but there
are a ton of really simple things you can do to speed up your phone,
even if you haven't done any hacking.
Try a New Home Screen Launcher
As always, I'm a huge fan of LauncherPro,
as it will not only bring you a noticeable speed increase upon
installing it, but it also has lots of advanced features we can tweak to
boost our speed even further (more on that later). Of course, ADWLauncher is also very popular, and the Android Market is good with other options.
I'm going to write the rest of this tutorial from the perspective of a
LauncherPro user, since from what I've seen, it has the most
speed-boosting options, but you should be able to find many of the
settings I mention below in other launchers, too—I'll note where a few
of them are along the way, but you may have to do some poke around of
your own depending on what Launcher you're using.
Lower the Number of Home Screens You Use And Delete Those Widgets
If you have an HTC phone with the exclusive Sense UI and you'd rather
not ditch it for something like LauncherPro, that's fine—you can still
put this tip into practice. While some phones, like the Motorola Droid ,
come with a mere three five home screens, many (including most
HTC phones) come with up to seven. While this is pretty handy if you
like lots of icons and widgets (which I'll mention again in a moment),
they can really take up a lot of memory on your phone, which can cause laggy animations, lag, and force closes.
It's fine to have lots of home screens, icons, and widgets, but if your
phone isn't performing up to your standards, you may have to compromise
and try using fewer home screens . I
went down from seven to three home screens and haven't looked back—the
jump in performance was pretty good.
If you're using LauncherPro, you can pick your number of home screens by
hitting the Menu button on your phone, tapping Preferences, then
tapping Homescreen Settings. If you're sticking with your stock
launcher, you may not have the option to actually decrease the number of
home screens, but you can still benefit by removing some icons and
widgets from two to four of your home screens. It probably won't give
you as big of a benefit as getting rid of the screens entirely,
but those widgets can still suck up tons of memory, and deleting them
from your home screen should make your phone run noticeably smoother.
Uninstall Misbehaving Apps
One of the real problems with slow phones is running poorly coded apps—apps that use up too much CPU in the background. Watchdog
is still a great way to keep track of those apps: if something is
constantly running in the background, it may be causing some of the
performance issue on your device. Unless it's something you can't live
without ,
uninstall it and find an alternative.
Note that some of the worst part in this category are apps that
come pre-installed on your phone. Unfortunately, you need to be rooted
to uninstall these, but we'll talk about that in a bit.
Uninstall or Move Apps to Free Up Space
It's also worth mentioning that even if an app doesn't misbehave (heck,
even if you don't run it at all), it can cause slowdowns on your device.
Believe it or not,
the more free space you have in your phone's internal memory, the
faster your phone can write to the disk. If you aren't sure how much
free space your phone has, you can check it by going to Settings > SD
Card & Phone Storage to see. You can also see which ones are taking
up the most space by going to Settings > Applications > Manage
Applications, hitting Menu, and sorting them by size. If you find you
aren't even using an app that's hogging space, you might as well
uninstall it—no point in keeping it around just so it can slow down your
phone.
Your other option is to use the ever-handy Apps2Sd to move some of those
apps off your phone's internal storage and onto your SD card. By
default, the developer of a given app usually decides whether an app
will install to your SD card, but with the App 2 SD
app, you can do it yourself. Just open the app, and you'll get a
list of apps that are on your internal storage that have the ability to
move to the SD card. Just move them over to free up space.
If You've Rooted Your Phone
If you've taken the steps and rooted your Android device,
you have a few more options available to you that should help you enjoy
some extra speed out of your device. Note that these are a bit more
advanced (as would be expected with root-only options), and require a
bit more care, so be sure to backup your phone before you make any huge
changes to it in case anything goes wrong.
Install a Custom ROM
Still one of the best reasons to root your phone is to install a custom
ROM, not only for the neat features it brings but for the speed
increases it can bring your phone. I do recommend it if you
need some speed increases, especially if the ROM is based off a later
version of Android than your phone currently has. Lots of phones(as well as user) are
still stuck with 2.3.6(Gingerbread), and while some ROMs can run a bit
slower than stock Android on some phones, the speed increases Android 4.0 brings likely outweigh them.
Many ROMs are built for speed and stability, and while you'll get a
great performance boost from them, I've found that even with a ROM like
CyanogenMod I've been able to enjoy some good performance out of my phone
(especially by tweaking some of CyanogenMod's advanced features). So
don't think that you have to choose a ROM like Bugless Beast just
because you have an old phone. Of course, trying a few different ROMs is
always a good idea to see what works best for you.Overclock Your Phone's Processor
A sure way to get a speed boost out of your old, underpowered phone is to overclock it. I will remind you that to overclock, you'll need to install a custom kernel.
These are specific to your device, so you'll have to do some googling
for compatible overclocking kernels to find one that's right for you.
Generally, kernels are organized by two things: voltage and clock speed.
The higher clock speed you choose, the more likely you'll need a higher
voltage kernel (which, by the way, will drain battery faster). As long
as you're not going overboard with the overclocking, you should be able
to get by with a low or standard voltage kernel without a problem.
Note overclocking your device to high voltage may lead to faster battery drain and heat issue,which can cause damage to hardware of your device.
Uninstall Crapware
If your phone came pre-installed with all sorts of applications that you don't need, you can unisntall them with an app called Titanium Backup.
Once you've downloaded it, just open it up and hit the "Backup/Restore"
button at the top of the screen. Tap the app you want to get rid of.
You'll probably want to back it up first, in case it ends up being
integral to your phone's operation, but once you have you can uninstall
it from the same screen. Alternatively, you can just freeze the app,
which won't free up space on your phone's memory, but will keep it from
running in the background and slowing your phone down.
Note also that,
like all these root-only options, you could seriously mess up your phone
if you go too crazy, so maybe a full-phone backup is also a good choice
here.
That's it about How to Speed Up Your Old or Sluggish Android Device. If you have any question be sure to ask us down the comment or via Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment