There’s no need to upgrade your tablet with every new release. Wayne Williams shows how to extend the life of an old tablet
Every year, tech manufacturers like Apple and Samsung release shiny new tablets to tempt us to upgrade, but there’s often no need to ditch your old model for a fancy new device. An iPad you bought years ago will run the same apps as today’s hardware, and may even run iOS 10, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. Some older, cheaper Android tablets might not fare so well but with a bit of care and attention, they should still provide a few more years of use. Here’s what you need to do to extend your tablet’s lifespan.
Upgrades, free space and restarts
There are a number of things that can improve the performance of your tablet, however old or new it is, so let’s tackle the basics first.
Upgrading to the latest version of your operating system promises to give your tablet a new lease of life, but this doesn’t always happen. Most iPads less than four years old should be able to upgrade to iOS 10, provided there’s enough space on the device. If your iPad isn’t compatible, it will be offered the latest version of iOS that it can run.
To upgrade your OS, go to the General section of the Settings app. If you can’t upgrade from the device, try connecting it to a computer and downloading the update via iTunes. This often works better for updating an older device.
Upgrading Android tablets isn’t as straightforward, because there are so many different makes of device it can run on. The decision to support a new version of Android is made by your manufacturer and you’ll be notified if your tablet is going to be supported.
It’s also important to keep plenty of free space on your device so it can properly optimise itself. Battling for storage space slows down a device, so you should aim to keep it half empty if possible. Don’t let it drift over 75% full if you want it to operate at peak performance.
As well as regularly backing up and removing videos and photos, and deleting unused apps, you should use a cleaning tool such as CCleaner for Android (bit.ly/cclean409). Even a hard reset – simply turning your device off and back on again – can help clear caches and the like, and may give a quick performance boost.
Keep your tablet TRIM
The SSDs (solid-state drives) that you plug in to your PC use a technology called TRIM to manage the data on them. This special command is built into the drive and is used by Windows to better manage the deleted space, which makes the drives faster and more efficient.
Tablet memory isn’t as sophisticated but some manufacturers have their own way of organising data, which occurs in the background when a device is idle. The next time you recharge your device and don’t need to use it immediately, try leaving it plugged in. While in this idle state, your tablet may perform its own housekeeping. Some people have reported that leaving their device plugged in and idle for 24 hours has improved the performance, so it’s worth a try.
Expand the tablet’s capacity
Some Android tablets have a microSD slot, which you can use to increase the device’s capacity. When you buy a microSD card, it’s worth spending a little extra money to get a faster model. SD cards are categorised by speed and go up to category 10, while category 10 cards can have a further two grades of UHS (Ultra High Speed, graded at UHS-1 or UHS-3, the latter being the faster). Check your device’s specification and buy the highest category card it can handle. All the speed categories are backwards-compatible, so faster cards will work in older devices but data will only transfer at the highest rate that the tablet can support.
If your tablet doesn’t have a memory slot, or you have an iPad, you can instead connect a wireless hard drive or a dongle to the tablet. Adam Elements’ iKlips Duo (www.adamelements.com) is a flash storage device for iPads that connects to a tablet through its Lightning port. It has a USB 3.1 adapter at the other end, so you can easily copy files between an iPad and a PC; or you can just use it to store photos and videos, away from the iPad’s main storage.
Minor tweaks to add speed
You might be able to speed things up a fraction by carefully choosing which apps you use. Apple’s apps are designed specifically to run on Apple hardware, which may give them the advantage over apps by other developers. Safari, for example, uses fewer resources than Google Chrome. The pre-installed apps may not have the same tools as the alternatives in the app store, but they should be faster and more stable.
Having Siri Suggestions turned on during searches can hog your tablet’s resources, so it’s worth turning it off if you have no need for it. To do this, go to Settings, General, then Spotlight Search. Other resource-hogging search options can be turned off, too.
Some people suggest you can free up resources by closing apps that are running in the background (in iOS, you do this by double-clicking the Home button and swiping away the open apps) but, in fact, this is only of use if an app has frozen or crashed.
Reduce resource-hogging iOS settings
iOS offers all sorts of fancy graphical effects. Reducing these can free up resources to boost your tablet’s performance. In iOS go to Settings, General, Accessibility. To kill unnecessary animations, turn on the Reduce Motion setting.
Next, tap the Increase Contrast option, and enable the Reduce Transparency setting. This removes the transparency effects found on certain elements of the interface, freeing up some processing power. These changes won’t make a huge difference, but they may help if your tablet is struggling to perform well.
You can also disable the Background App Refresh tool. Go to General, Background App Refresh. You can either disable it entirely or choose which apps are allowed to refresh their content in the background, so you don’t waste your tablet’s resources on apps you rarely use.