New member seeks advice re the htc mini 2

[Kinny999]

Morning all,

Apologies for making my first post a plea for help but i thought this would be a better place to start than with EE's phone support.

Ok so hopefully in brief...

My girlfriend bought a mini 2 after seeing my m8 and being impressed with everything but the overall size and instead opted for the mini 2.
Everything was fine for the last couple of months but now her phone is ridiculously unresponsive and i've tried everything from soft resetting to deleting apps one by one to see if any app in particular is slowing things down.

Other than installing solo launcher, some custom icons and home screens and 'hello' in place of the default sms service the phone is pretty much still as it came out of the box.
The phone seems to grind to a halt at random regardless of what's open and a lot of the time freezes while trying to open something, only cming back to life after serveral minutes o being left alone or a soft reset.

Now she's a bit of a nightmare for having a billion apps open in the background unlike me who has more than a touch of ocd when it comes to shutting apps down etc. She only really uses the phone for social networks and music as a rule, so its not even like she's trying to do too much at once?

My main question i guess is does this sound like a normal issue or could it be a combination of many apps open and having solo launcher installed?
I realise i've not yet performed a hard reset but just wanted to sound out a few opinions before trying that and enduring days of resetting passwords for her or going back to EE and trying to get the phone switched?


Any help or advice is greatly appreciated and if there's any more info i can provide, please feel free to ask and ill update as soon as i get chance.

 

[Rukbat]

Apologies for making my first post a plea for help but i thought this would be a better place to start than with EE's phone support.

No apology needed - that's what the forum is for. Welcome.

My main question i guess is does this sound like a normal issue or could it be a combination of many apps open and having solo launcher installed?

No and yes. Android fills memory with as much as it can (Multitasking the Android Way), unlike Windows, which likes as much free RAM as possible. If an app is sitting in the background not being used, and Android needs the space, it just kills the app. (Android apps are responsible for making sure that their data is always stored - Windows programs are asked if they can be killed, and can say no if they have unsaved data (or any other reason).

I realise i've not yet performed a hard reset but just wanted to sound out a few opinions before trying that and enduring days of resetting passwords for her or going back to EE and trying to get the phone switched?

The first thing I'd try is to do a safe mode restart. That starts the phone with no user-installed apps running. Try running them one at a time, Force stopping them when you've eliminated that program as a suspect. You might get lucky and find a rogue app.

If that doesn't find it, I'd say to use Helium to back everything up first, including data, copy the backup (the folder is named Carbon, because that's what Helium used to be called), then doing a factory reset. You can restore one app and its data at a time and see if something is causing a problem.

Also have her store all her passwords on a password app - there are a few good free ones (I use KeePass, there are others). If she uses an app that has a PC (or Mac if that's what she uses) equivalent, and uses Dropbox, Google Drive or some other cloud account for storing the data file (KeePass is pretty strongly encrypted. And if the NSA or MI5 or some other similar agency wanted my passwords, they'd get them anyway), all the devices will be using the same file, so adding an account to one, or changing the password on one, does the same on all. You still might have to restore passwords on apps, but they're ll there in one place, protected by one password she can remember, and she can use 16 or 20 rnadom character mixed mode passwords - which VERY few people will have the stupidity to try to crack, even with an automatic program. Unless she's wealthy, the return on breaking into her bank account, per hour of work, is less than panhandlers make by begging on the street.

 

[Kinny999]

Many thanks i'll try to go through those steps today and report back this evening. Thanks again.