Piece of junk is pissing me off so much lately I feel like throwing it at a wall. Having to pull the battery out 2 - 3 times a day from freezing and crashing. What can I do to make it work normal again? Should I just format and restore it from scratch? Is there a better option? It's not rooted.
Slowdowns and poor performance in these high performance devices, like the S4, Note and Note 2, etc, most often are as a result of loaded up resources. That can happen in all sorts of ways.
Task killers are device resource killers... they cause service loops because they kill seeming innocent services that are needed for more than one system action, so the services are in restart mode 100% of the time, causing issues as you describe.
Get the heck rid of the task killer and go clean out your cache and data in Application Manager. Reboot then uninstall 3rd party apps that sync in the background.. keep the ones that have a menu item letting you sync on demand, that way they won't be running all the time. A great way to speed up any smartphone.
Shut the device down and remove the battery and SIM card, then just put them back in and clear the cache partition (with the device OFF):
- hold down the home button, then at the same time the volume up button, then at the same time the power button (in that order, holding all three, but don't try holding the power button first or it'll just boot up; we don't want that)
- with all three buttons held down, wait for the little android robot then in a second or two the white letters, "...Galaxy...etc"
- quickly release all buttons, the recovery menu will appear
- use the volume down button to navigate to "wipe cache partition" and press the power button
- let it happen, when done the "reboot now' will be highlighted, press power to boot
