Every one among us has witnessed slowing of our mobile phones, computers, laptops and tablets over the time. After a few years of serving you, these gadgets do not offer the same spring as they did when you unboxed them.
Have you ever thought of the reason behind the debased execution and inevitable sluggishness of our gadgets as they age?
Why do you think your devices wear out with time or are manufacturers degrading their performance with software updates?
Have you ever thought why with the release of a new model of iPhone you start facing iPhone slow spike with its older model?
To answer all these questions, and to offer the solution we present you our article” Why gadgets get slow as they age?”
The slowing down of the gadgets is not the result of any typical single cause. Plenty of conspiracy theories and several contributing factors are considered to be working behind. As both software and hardware can suffer, that is why even if you reset your computer or laptops completely the speed issue may not solve.
Software slowdowns
Every time Microsoft, Google and Apple push a new OS update, it includes more powerful features to apps. Today almost all aspect of hardware have improved drastically. Its obvious that if the hardware capabilities of more modern laptops or smartphones are better than developers will take advantage of this and by optimising their code will add advanced features. To track additional features and to take advantage of latest hardware the developers update the code. But your device stays unchanged. On the other hand, the less efficient old code is overlooked, and it lags behind. The net effect is that your computer, laptop or your old smartphone has to work hard to place added demands to give the same result. With the 3d party apps, the story is identical. In the run to keep up with the changes in the system, the older devices lag behind entirely.
Your device came with a specific version of its operating system when you bought it. These OS versions when came out were developed with particular hardware set. Today improvements are made keeping newer hardware specs in mind. For a smoother experience, these more modern versions of OS need more resources and computing power. Thus your old device cannot handle extra load and feels slow.
You have a straightforward solution to this issues, and that is to keep your device in the era you brought it. You may apply minor upgrades but avoid significant upgrades.
Have you heard of software entropy? Every app in your device updating at different times causes software entropy. More the developers and apps are participating and interacting more inefficiencies appear.
Another reason for software slowdowns is memory bloating. With each update, the app is loaded with advanced features and becomes massive. Your device has to do more computation than before to carry extra functionality. To respond quickly, the spare capacity becomes less and speed is compensated. Newer apps also take much space in your device that has limited fast RAM( Random Acess Memory) available.When RAM gets full, and space is restricted It takes OS much longer time to juggle the data it needs to juggle, and the system slows down. As RAM runs out of space, your older version device shifts things to slow flash memory, data storage which takes much time.
Now let’s talk about background apps. When you bought your mobile phone, you have some apps, but now you must have installed more apps. Go to the setting, and you can check the number of apps you have downloaded since you got your device, Some of the apps run in the background although you may not use them actively. In fact, the home screen widgets and animated wallpapers also need resources for doing what they do. Additional apps use RAM and CPU leaving less space for the apps that work actively. There is a solution to this problem. Identify the apps that are draining your battery and uninstall them if you don’t use them actively. Disable the background processing apps, avoid relying on widgets and better switch to static wallpaper.
Tablets and smartphones run on flash memory. A common type of flash memory is NAND which is affordable and fast. But few quirks affect its performance. As NAND memory fills, it gets slow as there should be a specific amount of Empty blocks for its peak performance. When NAND memory reaches its limit, performance is affected as cells wear out. As your device always writes data, there is inevitable deterioration.
One more possibility is that malware or other malicious software has corrupted your device and effected computing capabilities by using memory space, disk space and other system resources. The zero cost action when you see a severe drop in performance of your gadget is to uninstall unnecessary add-ons and apps and run full system security scan.
Not just software developers but you too contribute to a slowing of your gadgets. Your setting preferences, saved files and your user data add complexity. Your continually adding extensions to the browsers or setting up programs to launch increases pressure on hardware. We all regularly keep on adding stacks of videos and photos to the internal storage of the device and forget to clear it up. However modern gadgets are better at managing this. Still it is an issue, especially with your older hardware.
Hardware slowdowns
The typical reason for hardware slow down is software bloat. But along with this, physical degradation also happens with time. The batteries inside our laptops and mobile phones degrade as it ages and reduces the time you used to get to work with your gadgets between charging. However, this does not have a direct impact on your device speed, but then manufacturers throttle the speed of CPU to compensate for reduced battery performance.
Again the battery that is wearing out has also its share of crashes, but your apps are required to run at the same speed as before.
Mechanical hard drives also slow down before getting exhausted entirely. Power cuts and buggy codes may lead to occasional corruptions and in return OS has to work more, and the performance is affected. Also, keep in mind that drives that is used continuously at high temperature fail faster. Other components of the device such as memory and CPU during the lifetime of the device do not slow and work at the same level before they fail
A gradual slowdown of your gadget is inevitable but to make it run smooth as long as possible keep free space on your device. For this better install as few apps as you can and keep them lean. Update OS and your apps when given a chance. Reinstall OS and reset your phone to cut most of the contributing factors responsible for gadget slowdowns. But make sure you restore the original OS that came with your device.
