Ancient tablet always running slow :(

The problem is twofold. First killing apps is counterproductive. It can (and in your case, probably does) make a device less efficient. The second problem is by today's standards it's an under-powered device with limited resources.

The force-closes you get are most likely from you killing an app or service that shares resources with the app you want to run. Android wants to keep those services active but you keep killing them. Forget 'additional ram'. Freeing up ram will not make an android device run better, it will make it slower ... and flaky.

Take a read through

https://androidforums.com/threads/p...k-killers-ram-optimizers-and-the-like.896663/

and

https://androidforums.com/threads/why-you-dont-need-a-task-killer.335110/

This topic has been discussed extensively.

As for your problem, I think the best you could hope for is to audit your device for the apps you think are essential and only have those installed. Then backup your device and perform a factory reset and only install your core apps, leaving the task killers and optimizers off the list.

There really are no apps or tweaks that can make your device have a faster processor or more memory. Those are strictly hardware limitations.

 

Greenify is one of those apps that sits on the fence for utility. While it's true that it doesn't kill apps in the traditional "task-killer" way, it still will "force stop" the app once it's been run. A force stop is pretty much killing it with dependencies, so while it's a bit more elegant, it's still lipstick on a pig, IMHO.

Theoretically, but Android is not that simplistic. When there is a chunk of free memory on an Android device, the OS will place recently used or frequently used apps there with the premise being that if you ran them recently or you open it a lot, you're bound to launch it again. Keeping it cached reduces the performance hit on the device if you had to open it as if loading it for the first time. This isn't Windows or other desktop OS's where having free resources speeds performance. It's actually the other way around for most 'nix environments.

Also consider that these services that supposedly optimize your tablet need to run all the time and steal resources from the apps you want to be running. Android, all by itself, will gracefully unload any cached apps from active RAM when required. Trying to out-anticipate the OS's memory needs is an exercise in futility.

 

Live wallpapers really put a load on the GPU, especially on older devices. They are on all the time. It's like towing a camper with a Corolla. The apps, as long as there are no associated services, should have a negligible impact on performance when you're not using them, but many of them keep services alive like a weather app that warns you about storms, or a sports app that updates the scores. Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, etc. all keep communications going so you get notifications. If you turn all of that off, you might gain some performance back, but you'll lose a lot of functionality.

 

If you aren't using the live wallpaper, it should only take up storage space, but a lot of these have services that will check the dev's website to look for updates or worse, push ads.

I'm not sure about the TTS engines, but I'd be surprised if they also didn't have some services running all the time, too.

A GPU is the Graphics Processing Unit, similar to the video card in your PC. It handles everything that shows up on your screen.