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DaWolfe

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Been looking all over for answers and can't seem to find any. I was hoping someone here could help me.

I have a Motorola Droid X, and I upgraded to Gingerbread a few weeks ago. At first things seemed fine as I wasn't experiencing issues as others seemed to be. But I am now.

My most common issues are along the lines of:

When I wake my phone up and unlock the screen, or when I am in an application and hit the home button to exit and go to the home screen, almost every time, the background picture comes up, but it can take up to 45 seconds or so for the icons to load on the home screen. It is SLOW, and I just have to sit and wait on it to load when it wants to. This is a real disadvantage when I need to make a quick, important call, and have to wait for my phone to decide it is ready to use. (And speaking of phone calls, often I hit the "call/send" button, and it does nothing, so I assume it isn't calling, but then it will start ringing on the other end, but the screen on my end will not show a call is in progress till about the 3rd ring.)

I often find myself pressing the screen, and often it will not respond, or again, take 20 seconds or so to respond to my touch - which by then I have touched made several other actions and the thing gets bogged down.

I suddenly lost several icons/shortcuts/widgets on my home screens. I have tried to add them back but it will not let me. It will tell me there is no room, when clearly there is. I can touch the free area of the screen, and it gives me the option to add things there, but then after going through the steps, and placing the icon in the free area, it just disappears.


I am sure these are common issues, I just haven't seemed to find an answer for it. And it is very frustrating. I have tried things like clearing the cache. And although I had plenty of storage room, I tired freeing up room on the device by deleting applications that I no longer use. It shows now that I am using 661MB of Internal Storage, with 5.9 GB free, and used 3.9 GB on the SD card, with 11 GB free. So i figure that is not the problem.

Any help or advice anyone could give would be very much appreciated!

DW
 
Two fixes come to my mind.... one would be to do a factory reset, but you'd lose all your setting and apps, although your paid apps and some settings would be restored. I'd consider this to be a last resort fix tho. :D

Secondly, try popping out your sdcard and see if it helps. Your card might be starting to fail. You have to remove the back and the battery to get to it.
 
Colchiro -

Thanks for the help. I took my sdcard out and, for the most part, the slowness/bogging down issue has been fixed. It happens every now and then, but over the past few days, things are MUCH better as far as that is concerned.

I still have the home screen problem though. I have a home screen that has several blank spots in which I cannot add a widget, shortcut, etc. It will allow me to take the proper steps to do so, but as soon as I place the shortcut on the screen it disappears. I hate to do a factory just for this problem. Any suggestions on this?

Thanks so much for the previous help. It has made things a lot smoother having that sdcard out.

DW
 
If removing your sdcard seemed to fix the problem, I'd copy the contents to your computer, format the card and move them back.

If that doesn't fix the problem, you might need a new card.

You might benefit from a reset, but it seems the sdcard is the problem.

Plug your sdcard into a usb adapter or card slot. Make sure you can see your sdcard files. See if you have a LOST.DIR folder on it. If you see files inside that folder, you can delete them. If there's more than 20 files there, that might be a problem.

Create a folder on your computer's "C" drive and call it X. You want a short name since you have a lot of long file names on your sdcard and you don't want to have errors due to paths too long.

Copy all the files on your sdcard to your "X" folder by highlighting several folders and dragging them over. Hopefully this will copy over in under an hour, instead of days.

If you get a usb message that says something like this device could be faster, unplug it and try again. If it's an old computer and you have a newer one, try that. Old computers with XP might not be able to do it faster as that requires USB 2.0 or 3.0.

When it finishes, right-click on the drive and choose Format... Make sure it says fat32, not ntfs. The rest of the settings can stay as is. When done, copy the files back to the sdcard. Then right-click on the drive in my computer and choose "eject" or choose "safely remove hardware" by the clock and find it there. Failure to do this can cause corruption of the file system.

Stick it back in your X and try it again.
 
Thanks for the information. I followed your instructions. The file system was already FAT32.

Is the sdcard something I really need, or is it just for extra storage? I seem to have plenty of room on the device right now.

There is a big difference in the way the phone responds when the sdcard is in compared to being out. If it is something I don't really need, maybe I can get by with leaving it out.

But the home screen problem is very annoying.

Thanks again for your help with this!

DW
 
So you're saying you went to all that work and the problem is still there? You might complain at your friendly VW store and maybe they'll replace your sdcard for free. You still have the backed up files, right? (A $25 sdcard is cheaper than replacing your phone.) :D

You'll need the sdcard to download anything from your browser and many games/apps require to be installed on it. So doubt you can go for long without it.
 
Yeah, the problem is still there.

I have left my sdcard out for a few weeks now, just to see how things went. But you were right, there have been many times I have needed it since it has been out.

But the phone is starting to act the same way it did before with the sdcard in. It is getting slow again. Sometimes it takes what seems like 45 seconds or so after I hit the "home" button, for the home screen to show up with all the icons/shortcuts/widgets, etc.

So removing the sdcard did work for a few weeks, but it is catching back up with me.

Maybe I should just do a factory reset. Any tips on how to make this easy on myself and save as much info/settings/etc. as possible? Do I need to put the sdcard back in for the reset?

Thanks again for all your help.
 
A lot of settings (like wireless) and paid apps come back on their own. Email accounts would need to be re-entered and many apps will need to be installed/setup again tho.

If you're rooted, you can make a recovery backup (in case it doesn't fix the problem) and backup via Titanium Backup.

You could also try booting into recovery and formatting cache partition and clearing Dalvik cache. That might not help, but it's not destructive like a factory reset.

Settings... privacy... factory reset (I think).
 
I ended up doing a factory reset. Seems to be working much better now. Got rid of all that clutter and stuff I realized I didn't really need. Isn't bad having a fresh start anyway.

Thanks so much for all the help and advice you gave!
 
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