Try these out before getting it serviced.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Do you have an old Android smartphone? Are you finding it hard to run apps due to frequent errors or is the battery draining out faster than usual? Before you go to the nearest service center to fix it, try some of the best fixes that you can do by yourself to bring the smartphone back to performance.
- Go to settings, developer options and switch it on. In the same window, enable “Force GPU Rendering” (this will share the overload with the graphic interface and speed up the phone), switch Windows Animation Scale to “Animation off” and lastly in settings, switch the runtime from ‘Dalvik’ to ‘ART’.
- Back up the images and videos to your computer or hard disk. This will free internal memory of the phone, reducing the load time of apps. Also, remove “Cache Data” as this also use the internal space. Moreover uninstall apps that you seldom visit and move heavy apps to external storage as these could overload the smartphone.
- If the Android operating environment is customized by the vendor, try removing or disabling some of the built-in apps that you never use. For example, the apps supporting hand gesture, eye sensor etc. can eat up the battery and run in the background resulting in lag. Also, it is advised to install lite launchers such as Nova or Google Now Launcher as it can override the heavy launcher customized by the vendor of your smartphone.
- For multiple Google account users, it is advised to disable the activities that are irrelevant for the user. Also it is advised not to sync data using the 3G network as it could drain the battery in a few hours.
- Last but not least, try doing Factory Rest. This will remove all the apps installed after purchasing the phone. You also have an option to do hard reset, which will remove all files in the Internal Storage and also contacts saved in the Phone memory. But this should be done only after safely backing up all the data in the phone to an external or cloud storage.