Slower after ICS? Or is is just me...

[Icebike]

I swear my A500 seems slower after the ICS update than it was previously.

Navigating around the desktop is about the same speed, but running applications
I will get these frequent little slow-downs that drive me nuts.


On other news the A700 became available for pre-order today.

 

[BDiddy]

Yes, I've been noticing slowdowns on both my A500 and A100. Hard to tell if it's the system or some app--Chrome seems to be especially temperamental. Wondering if I need to do a factory reset. What a pain ...

 

[Mrhelper]

I swear my A500 seems slower after the ICS update than it was previously.

Navigating around the desktop is about the same speed, but running applications
I will get these frequent little slow-downs that drive me nuts.

On other news the A700 became available for pre-order today.

After the initial honeymoon with all the pretty new features, many of which I still like, I've concluded that this release for the a500 was not ready for prime time. There were just too many glitches that people are still discovering and trying to work around. It runs fine for me, because I have enough technical background to work around the problems I encounter, and actually enjoy working out the bugs. There are significant bugs which you will encounter if you use it long enough though, and most users do not want the hassle of working around bugs. They just want the device to work. It also seems to have given a number of app developers a run for their money to work around some of the issues.

I don't see general slowness, but I have seen specific slowness associated with certain misbehaving apps. For example, I now limit my use of Dolphin and the stock browser because they are background CPU vampires. Just open 4-5 tabs to some of your favorite sites, park these browsers in the background with those tabs still open, then watch with OS Monitor or Watchdog, and you will see what I mean. Opera Mobile has been my browser of choice lately... very clean, very configurable, and not a vampire.

There are other posts in a few of these forums describing issues like the MPU sensor device init problem and the GPS data leak problem (files build up unchecked in /data/gps whenever the GPS is turned on). These problems also impact performance. The MPU problem results in 20 error messages being written into the system log every second when the screen lock switch is not in the lock position. That's got to be causing slowness for some users, many of which may not even be aware of the problem. I've seen both of these problems on my tablet, and other owners are seeing other problems that I am not, most of which apparently started after the ICS update. I understand completely why some users are upset. Many just want to revert to ICS for the sake of returning to more functional stability. That seems perfectly rational and reasonable to me, and frankly, I think that it should be an option provided by Acer until they clean up their implementation of ICS a little better, so owners don't have to jump through hoops and worry about voiding warranties just to get back some functionality that they really valued, and have since lost.

There are still other app issues also. Chrome Beta is just so unstable that I stopped using it. I like some of the features, but I got tired of it crashing my whole tablet every few days. (Well, duh, the name does say beta).

After all of the problems I've seen, I still like ICS in general though. Many of the new features are nice -- such as being able to disable builtin apps that you don't want, app launcher folders, faster wifi connect, etc. I've gone through numerous Windows updates that were not much better, and some that were much worse. Acer can make this better with a subsequent repair update to fix most of the big problems, and that is what many are hoping for at this point in time. It seems inevitable, and I am willing to wait a while longer if it helps them put just a little more focus on the software quality this time.

The a700 is still on my wish list.

 

[BDiddy]

Chrome might have been the culprit. I have an A500 and A100, both with ICS. As an experiment, I did a factory reset of the A100 only, reloaded everything, and found that things were still a little choppy, especially Chrome. Then I uninstalled Chrome, and voila, the tablet started working snappily again. On my A500, I didn't factory reset, only uninstalled Chrome, and again, it seems to have solved the problem.

So try getting rid of Chrome if you have it installed. If the stock browser isn't to your liking, try Dolphin HD.

 

[Icebike]

Chrome might have been the culprit. I have an A500 and A100, both with ICS. As an experiment, I did a factory reset of the A100 only, reloaded everything, and found that things were still a little choppy, especially Chrome. Then I uninstalled Chrome, and voila, the tablet started working snappily again. On my A500, I didn't factory reset, only uninstalled Chrome, and again, it seems to have solved the problem.

So try getting rid of Chrome if you have it installed. If the stock browser isn't to your liking, try Dolphin HD.

Ok, chrome is off the tablet, we will test that for a few days.

Does make some sense, because chrome does try to sync up with your desktop chrome, so maybe that's where the cycles going.


Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Douvie]

Ok, chrome is off the tablet, we will test that for a few days.

Does make some sense, because chrome does try to sync up with your desktop chrome, so maybe that's where the cycles going.


Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk 2

I tried Chrome when I first got my tablet and it was a problem with HC back then. So I got rid of it. I haven't bothered to try it with ICS. I am trialing Firefox but have found that it crashes quite a bit. So far the stock browser is the most stable. So policy at this moment is "if the cap fits wear it."

I'll keep trialing Firefox until they come up with a stable version.

 

[BDiddy]

I thought Chrome was only available for ICS? Did you have some sort of specialized Honeycomb ROM?

And hey Icebike, what's the verdict--does it run better without Chrome installed?

 

[Douvie]

I thought Chrome was only available for ICS? Did you have some sort of specialized Honeycomb ROM?

And hey Icebike, what's the verdict--does it run better without Chrome installed?

I had Chrome for android HC 3.1 back in August/September 2011. It ran like a dog's breakfast.

 

[BDiddy]

I had Chrome for android HC 3.1 back in August/September 2011. It ran like a dog's breakfast.

I've never heard that saying, but man does it sound gross.

 

[Douvie]

I've never heard that saying, but man does it sound gross.

Oops! It an Aussie saying. But some mirror the American sayings. Obviously this is not one of them.

 

[Icebike]

I can confirm that all the lag that I was seeing in some games is gone from the tablet since I de-installed Chrome.
The slowdown I was seeing happened even in airplane mode, so it wasn't network traffic. It may have been that Chrome was just hogging memory, or had many background processes running.

I'll leave it off the tablet till a new release comes out.

(FTR: Recent versions of Chrome have worked flawlessly for me, no crashing. Its lack of Flash support was mostly a blessing, occasionally a minor inconvenience. )

Side rant: I'm REALLY tired of people who tried something once in the distant past, and proceed to badmouth it forever.

Douvie: A dogs breakfast is a term used in the US as well, but here it generally means a "collection or mixture of odds and ends",
not "mess" as the British use it.

 

[Douvie]

yeah you're right it does mean mess in the Aussie context.

Well Icebike I'm pleased that getting rid of CHROME has improved the performance. At least it solved that issue. I do notice that the stock browser gets clunky after a while. While firefox beta shows some promise, out of 5 page reads/refreshes it crashes at least twice. Hope they sort it out.

 

[buttonstc]

The ICS update has turned web browsing into a miserable frustrating experience for me

Im ready to sell my Acer while it still has decen market value and get another device altogether

Since its really impossible to tell whether the fault lies with Acer or with Google I m seriously considering something that runs on Gingerbread which apparently works smoothly im fed up with being an uncompensated Beta tester for an immature OS i think its ironic that for months everybody was chomping at the bit to get the update and talking about ICS like it was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself I dont need the latest and the greatest its usually way overrated i just want something that works plain and simple

i dont think thats too much to expect from a device costing hundteds of dollars .

 

[BDiddy]

The ICS update has turned web browsing into a miserable frustrating experience for me

Im ready to sell my Acer while it still has decen market value and get another device altogether

Since its really impossible to tell whether the fault lies with Acer or with Google I m seriously considering something that runs on Gingerbread which apparently works smoothly im fed up with being an uncompensated Beta tester for an immature OS i think its ironic that for months everybody was chomping at the bit to get the update and talking about ICS like it was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself I dont need the latest and the greatest its usually way overrated i just want something that works plain and simple

i dont think thats too much to expect from a device costing hundteds of dollars .

Could you be more specific about the browsing problems you're having? Are you using the stock browser, Chrome, or something else? As we have been discussing in this thread, if you have Chrome installed, then uninstall it--even if you're not using it to browse. If you're already using the stock browser, then try clearing the cache. If all else fails, try a factory reset, which will wipe all of your data from the tablet; however, it is very easy to reinstall all of your apps, especially if you chose to back up your settings to Google. Factory resets sometimes do wonders to clear out all of the cobwebs from the system, but obviously it's a last resort.

 

[Douvie]

The ICS update has turned web browsing into a miserable frustrating experience for me

Im ready to sell my Acer while it still has decen market value and get another device altogether

Since its really impossible to tell whether the fault lies with Acer or with Google I m seriously considering something that runs on Gingerbread which apparently works smoothly im fed up with being an uncompensated Beta tester for an immature OS i think its ironic that for months everybody was chomping at the bit to get the update and talking about ICS like it was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself I dont need the latest and the greatest its usually way overrated i just want something that works plain and simple

i dont think thats too much to expect from a device costing hundteds of dollars .

Just shows you man's promises and man's devices. Who ever said it going to be trouble free. Everybody was chomping at the bit, you were right, but the problem is not just ACER. In fact all tablet manufacturers are sweating it out at the moment. In fact HC 3.01 had probelms too. The update to 3.1, then 3.2 and eventually 3.2.1, caused problems with my tablet - I could'nt view .wmv movie clips. ICS fixed that for me. So in that sense ICS has improved my tablet - except for the browsing issues for me.

As they say,"you win some! You lose some." And if you're patient enough you find a work around.