Fine tuning the Motorola Droid
4G is all the rage right now, but I’m not eligible for a device upgrade until 2012. This means that I have to take some measures to extend the usefulness of my Motorola Droid.
My Droid has been getting significantly slower, and sometimes seems to hiccup itself into a rebooting.
I will be addressing this in a few ways. First I will work on fine tuning the stock OS and installed applications, later I will move on to rooting and installing a custom ROM.
I already installed Launcher Pro to use instead of the default Homescreen manager. I set my number of homescreens to 3 instead of 5. This helped. You can also use Launcher Pro to display the amount of memory being used right on the homescreen. I am using this right now during my testing.
I installed a cache cleaner and ran it to clear caches of applications. This also helped.
I did not realize that every shortcut displayed on the homescreen eats up memory. I did understand that widgets probably ate up memory and had already been limiting their use. I only have the bare minimum of shortcuts now.
I also found some threads indicating that alot of Text messages on the phone could slow it down and eat up memory, so I deleted all of my text messages.
I then disabled polling and notifications from the Facebook and Google+ applications.
My phone is now remarkable faster than it was. At first I thought it was placebo, but then I did the real test. I fired up the Camera app and, bang, it loaded in like 2 seconds. This phone has been restored to it’s former glory.
Soon I’ll be moving on to rooting my phone and installing a custom ROM. I’ll post my choice of custom ROMS and why I chose it. Then I’ll install it on my phone and post the directions and procedures that I used. Hopefully this will allow my fellow Motorola Droid users to fine tune their Droids to get more speed and a longer service life out of them!
Filed under: Android,Tips & Tricks - @ August 4, 2011 3:11 am