Have your devices slowed down considerably over time? Most manufacturers pride themselves on long-term, quality performance, thus your hardware “getting old” is hardly an excuse. Instead, the decreased speed and performance is likely influenced by the way you may be using your device, among other factors. Luckily there are ways to identify and address these issues.

Here are some common factors that may negatively affect your device’s performance, along with ways to improve it.

Memory
How many apps do you have installed on your device? These can be eating up your memory space. Aside from the volume of apps, with each app update often comes more features, necessitating larger storage space and more computations.

Devices have a limited amount of storage, and one of the storage components is the fast “Random Access Memory” (RAM). This acts like an office whiteboard, as it is quick and convenient, but limited in capacity. Also, the contents of the RAM are wiped every time you turn off your device.

Your flash memory kicks in when your device runs out of space. Unfortunately, the flash memory is much slower and moving things back and forth can take a long time. This process was formerly known as “thrashing” in older devices with mechanical hard disks because you could hear the read-write heads moving across the platters as data was being shifted in and out of the RAM.

Although flash memory is silent and much faster than magnetic hard disks ever were, it is still much slower than RAM.

Cache
Caching consists of storing copies of things in RAM in order to speed up processes. For example, a web browser may retain a copy of what the content in each tab looks like even if only one tab is visible at the moment. This makes things work much faster until your system starts to run out of memory. For maximum effectiveness, the amount of space devoted to this task must be carefully managed by the application and the device’s operating system.

When app developers disregard this task, these apps not only slow down over time, but can also slow your entire system down as well.

Software
Useful software sometimes comes with “crapware” or unnecessary add-ons such as browser toolbars. This can negatively impact performance by using up system resources such as permanent storage, RAM and the computer’s central processing unit “in the background”. Thus, there are fewer resources to respond to you promptly.

Another consequence of additional software could be that your device is infected with malware (viruses, worms).

New or factory-reset devices tend to have less of this accumulated “cruft” (unwanted data and software) installed, and therefore has more resources available to do the tasks the user wants.

Possible Solutions
So what can you do to speed things up? First, you must accept that your older model devices will not be able to compete with the latest, high-tech devices since these generally possess faster components. But there are some things you can do to make the most of your existing device.

The most useful and free thing you can do is uninstall unnecessary apps and add-ons. Or, after you carefully backup your data, you can try a factory reset and reinstall the operating system from scratch, adding only the apps that you truly need.

Do you have your own tips and tricks to speed up your devices? Share with us on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

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Tags: decreased speed, devices, performance