The old lessons

[Suff]

are the best one's to remember.

As you know I recently upgraded my old tablet to a higher bios level and also bough an 8" android tablet which works as a phone. So it was sort of working OK. The phone part is fine and works well here in the UK, the older tablet was a different issue. It had become very slow and was struggling, alttho9ugh still viable once it got going.

Eventually it was crunch time when I was trying to watch Tsonga and Murray on streaming iPlayer real time TV.The two tablets kept crashing. Eventually I got the bigger one to work but it did keep stopping and the display was often terrible. You might have thought it was the network except for one thing. My Android phone streamed it perfectly in high quality the whole time, only causing a problem when it's wifi signal completely dropped out.

In the end I was looking for a tablet for a friend at work when I found an 8 core one with 32 gig of ROM instead of the usual 16gb at £110. I got it yesterday and have been setting it up today. It's on Android 5 so is a direct comparison with my other tablets.

Checking iPlayer today it works perfectly in high performance and with an excellent display.

So what was the problem? Was it the processors in the others? Actually not. After a bit of kicking around I determined the one similarity between my phone and my new tablet. They both have 2G of RAM. On checking the RAM usage of the tablet, I found that it was using 1.2GB or .2GB more than the other two tablets have onboard. Simply put, the other two tablets were running out of memory and could not do the job. Which is a bit sad in terms of the Archos because it's brand new. However it is also cheap, cheerful and useful for what it was bought for, namely making calls on my Bluetooth headset and reading books on plus a bit of surfing.

The performance was a classic memory issue. It's useful to know because that means ALL new tablets with Android 5 and above absolutely have to have 2gb of RAM or more. One to watch out for when you are looking.

[Workingman]

It is one thing I noticed with Andthememoryhogdroid. The damned thing keeps apps running in the background even though you think that you turned them off. It also loads apps it thinks you might us sometime, whenever.

Chrome browsers do the same. You shut it down, right. No! It keeps some processes running to save you a nanosecond should you open it again.

All of this is using memory, and your battery.