Why is my once fast tablet now painfully slow?

[Joel Gresch]

So, the long short is that I have a tablet that used to be very fast, and now is very very very slow, and I have no explanation why.

It's an Asus Memo Pad 7 LTE. Back when I had a slow and unreliable phone, this was my mobile gaming / YouTube device. I used it to play Minecraft, Star Wars KOTOR (an original Xbox port), Call of Duty Mobile, and lots of other great games. I was probably averaging 30-40 fps. Totally useable, and I was quite happy with it.

After sitting powered off in a climate controlled desk drawer for over a year, I thought I'd get it out to play some of those old games. It was UNPLAYABLE. Frame rates were suddenly 1 to 2 fps, and I was constantly bombarded with "app not responding" messages from games and background processes.

Here's the kicker...

My brother has the exact same tablet, purchased at the same time. While mine sat in the drawer, he was wondering what to do with his old potato. "Play some games!" I said. "It's actually really fast!". He installed the previously mentioned Star Wars Game, and found that he could hardly move, let alone swing a lightsaber.

"That's weird..." I thought. "Mine really is fast. I'll show you!" After running back to my house and pulling out the old brick, I found it had the exact same issue. A device that once could compete with a laptop was now unable to pass the lock screen without showing "System UI is not responding."

I've tried the following:

•Factory reset
•Clear cache
•Disable unused apps
•Set BG process limit to 0
•Enable "Don't keep apps"
•Check CPU usage for resource hogs

I've completely come up short. I'm beginning to think there is some conspiracy afoot, like a built-in "slow down device" countdown that forces you to get a new device when yours gets too outdated. Silly, I know.

My main question is WHY? HOW? WHAT? Mainly the first one. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Is it also slow in Safe Mode? https://www.hardreset.info/devices/asus/asus-memo-pad-7-me375cl/safe-mode/.

When you did the factory reset, did you automatically restore from a backup right afterwards? If so, then try another factory reset, and this time set it up as a brand new device, then install just one game and see if the problems persist.

It could be the FSTRIM issue that plagued older devices: https://pocketnow.com/android-trim-support. Although your tablet shipped with Android 4.4, that may not be a guarantee that FSTRIM was enabled, and so over time, that may have led to deterioration of the NAND memory. There's an app called Trimmer that's supposed to help, but unfortunately it requires root, and I don't think there's a root exploit available for that tablet: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-to-root-asus-memo-pad-7-lte-me375cl.3176332/