Fighting OS rot and lag in Cyanogenmod 10.3

Last Updated on December 5, 2015 by Dave Farquhar

So I have Cyanogenmod 10.3 running on a Nook Color that I use as a secondary tablet. It’s outmoded, but still useful enough that I want to keep it around. But a week or two ago, it suddenly started to lag really badly. So I looked into it a little bit.

Some other Android tablets have some trouble with TRIM. Android generally handles it decently on its own, but it doesn’t always seem to. I found an app–for rooted tablets only–called Lagfix that lets you force TRIM yourself.

TRIM is basically a form of garbage collection, where free space is wiped, because a fresh wipe takes less time than a rewrite. It’s not analogous to defragmenting a platter hard drive, but the effects on performance are similar.

Running Lagfix on my venerable Nook Color definitely seemed to put a spring back in its step. As a single-core tablet running at 1.1 GHz, it’s never going to win any races, but now it’s usable again for playing media files and checking the news and weather.

So if you have an Android tablet or phone and it seems to have lost a step or two with age, it’s worth giving Lagfix a try to see if it helps.

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