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Posted

I have a Lenovo tablet that I use mostly for reading.  It's several years old (just checked it just turned 4).  Runs Android 10, 2GB RAM, and some mediatek processor before they were anything but a cheap option.  About half of its storage of 32GB is used.

I use the Kindle App on it and FB Reader.  It still takes a charge (at least a day's worth anyway) and I recently "discovered" that if I leave it in airplane mode or turn off wifi, the battery life is much better.  So, wifi is off one way or the other most of the time except when I really need to surf something from the net, or to download content for the readers.

During normal operation, it's tolerable for reading and very light surfing, so maybe only two or three apps "open."  

But I notice that if I turn on wifi to commence a download or do some surfing, it becomes super-glitchy and slow.  It almost always then has some updates from Play queued up.  Fairly obviously, letting those install while trying to get anything done just about freezes it, but it's bad either way.

So, I guess this has become officially the oldest android device I have ever owned.  I do tend to extend phone use beyond the usual one or two years without suffering much, 

Is this just the nature of an old, cheap android device?  Would there be any benefit to a factory reset?  Should I uninstall apps with heavy background use (isn't that really all of them anymore?).

TIA.

Posted

android 10? jebus. we're on 15 now.

obviously if you're keeping apps on it that you don't use you should delete them. if that doesn't work maybe try a factory reset and see if that helps.

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Posted
1 minute ago, elfenix said:

android 10? jebus. we're on 15 now.

obviously if you're keeping apps on it that you don't use you should delete them. if that doesn't work maybe try a factory reset and see if that helps.

Haha yeah I know.  Being a Lenovo device, it was good for only one OS update.  So the OS itself isn't taxing the hardware, I guess.  But probably updated apps are.

More than anything, I guess I'm just curious about what happens when a device starts its death throes.  On the one hand, I'm not really a "power user" of electronics; on the other, I have been doing this long enough that I do things like close tabs, close apps, clear caches and clean up storage, and avoid the memory and resource hogs until I really need them, etc. so I can generally milk life out of devices beyond what a lot of people could tolerate.

As I said, it still works alright as a reader with the exceptions noted.  And I only have one or two apps "outwardly" open or active usually, the reader and maybe chrome or something else and with wifi off it works reasonably well.  Turn the wifi back on and it just crawls and glitches, at least until it reaches some steady state after 10-15 minutes.

One thing I do have a lot of on there that I rarely use is "media" apps, Netflix, Prime, Max etc.  I just don't usually watch movies or videos on small-screen devices.  I suppose those are bigger hogs even "inactive" than I might think.

Posted
1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

Turn the wifi back on and it just crawls and glitches, at least until it reaches some steady state after 10-15 minutes.

really seems like the main problem is that the OS sees available internet and starts doing updates immediately, but you only turn wifi on when you yourself need to access the intertrons. so you've got hardware that was comparatively limited when new getting multitasked fairly hard.

 

maybe you need to realize you take a shit at 7:30 each day and so turn the wifi on at 7 so it can get the updates out of the way first.

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, elfenix said:

really seems like the main problem is that the OS sees available internet and starts doing updates immediately, but you only turn wifi on when you yourself need to access the intertrons. so you've got hardware that was comparatively limited when new getting multitasked fairly hard.

 

maybe you need to realize you take a shit at 7:30 each day and so turn the wifi on at 7 so it can get the updates out of the way first.

Yeah, what I'm trying to do is when I charge it, turn off airplane mode/turn on wifi and let it reach a steady state so that when I come back and may need to download a book, I'm good to go.

Turning off wifi and saving battery is a blinding glimpse of the obvious.  But until recently, I was leaving wifi on most of the time and watching the battery drain pretty fast thinking the battery had just lost a lot of capacity, which it no doubt has.

Then flew not too long ago, keeping it in airplane mode and was kind of stunned how long it stayed at !00%.  Like the whole flight.

One thing that is kind of a bummer:  while the ereader apps seem to make minimal use of resources and operable without internet, one thing I had gotten kind of in the habit of doing is looking up words, places, historical events while I read and I can't do that easily anymore.  Maybe to my benefit, because I got completely stalled out on Guns of August once refreshing myself on shit like the Zimmerman telegram.

Edited by TwiceHorn
Posted
2 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, what I'm trying to do is when I charge it, turn off airplane mode/turn on wifi and let it reach a steady state so that when I come back and may need to download a book, I'm good to go.

Turning off wifi and saving battery is a blinding glimpse of the obvious.  But until recently, I was leaving wifi on most of the time and watching the battery drain pretty fast thinking the battery had just lost a lot of capacity, which it no doubt has.

Then flew not too long ago, keeping it in airplane mode and was kind of stunned how long it stayed at !00%.  Like the whole flight.

One thing that is kind of a bummer:  while the ereader apps seem to make minimal use of resources and operable without internet, one thing I had gotten kind of in the habit of doing is looking up words, places, historical events while I read and I can't do that easily anymore.  Maybe to my benefit, because I got completely stalled out on Guns of August once refreshing myself on shit like the Zimmerman telegram.

If that thing only has 2GB of memory, loading a webpage or three will max out that poor ol girl. I'd bet that thing is swapping pages out to storage CONSTANTLY, which is killing your performance. When you let it reach "steady state" it's doing fewer context switches and process swaps and able to put more CPU time into the IOps instead of IOwait as it tries to cope with such little freeable userspace memory

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