I had an s7 edge which went down the drain performance wise after a few months. Battery life severely deteriorated and Web browsing and typing became full of lag. Any tips in maintaining performance on my note 7 when I receive it?
I've never had a Samsung android system with TouchWiz before, so I don't know how TouchWiz itself may effect things. Here are basic android tips that should help.
Go into settings, app manager, select all apps. Click on and disable (uninstall any you can) any apps you know you aren't going to use.
Go to settings, about. Click software information. Click build number if its there, if its not and there is a "more" option look for a build number listing there. Click on "build number" until it says you are a developer. Go back a few screens and you should now see an item that says "developer options".
Look for an area that says animations. If you don't see it there it may be under an advanced or more area.
When you find it you can either uncheck show animations, or go into each of the animation scale options and change them to animations off.
You can also try installing an app that monitors and reports apps that are stalling or draining memory. Avast Cleanup and Clean Master are two possible options. Once you know what apps are an issue you can either kill them, disable them, or possibly uninstall them.
Go into settings, power, battery optimization, and select all apps. From there you can set what apps the system should close if they aren't detected as being used for awhile,
You can also go back into the developer options area (in advanced again) and set background process limits. You can experiment and see what setting works best for you. On one hand if you set no background or limited amounts of processes you'll maintain a lot of free RAM for your foreground tasks, and on the other hand if you don't limit it apps should stay in memory longer and make it easier to quickly switch between them or reload them quicker.
My advice is not to download major updates. My Note 5 was fast till I downloaded Marshmallow and now it lags.
You can fix the slow after update problem by clearing the system cache (not the same as app caches). Don't know how the Note 7 will boot to it, but most systems you do it by:
Turning off the system.
Hold down volume down and the power button at the same time (some systems it volume up). The system will usually show the green Android figure or a triangle with an exclamation mark. If there isn't a menu with multiple options tap the power button. There should be a system recovery option. Select that, and you should see a menu with a "clear system cache" option. Press the volume down button until you are on that option, and click the power button to choose it. That should clear your "system cache" and speed things up.