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Transferring to SD card

R

roy allen

Lurker
Forgive my ignorance; I'm a 65 yr old, not very tech savvy guy and my wife (the tech nerd in our house) is not familiar with Android at all. She has an I-Pad.

My Dragon Touch 10.1 screen, Duo-Core Cortex A9 CPU up to 1.6 Ghz, 4.2 Jelly Bean, 1Gb RAM, 8Gb HDD tablet (bought 2 months ago, admittedly for only $159.95) has been running slow, freezing up, etc. and seems to have done this after I have added some Apps like Nook, Kindle, Firefox Browser, Notepad, etc. My wife says maybe those Apps are taking up space and I might need to transfer some of those onto my 500 mgb SD card. How do you do that? And, would it really be that or is it maybe because it is a Duo Core (as opposed to Quad Core)...or 1.6Ghz (as opposed to something bigger) that would be causing the problem? Or, is it...you get what you pay for. :-)
Thanks.
 
It could well be space-related.

The phone needs free internal storage to run properly - my Nexus 4 complains when I have less than 1GB free and actually warns that apps will stop working when free internal storage gets below around 300MB.

If you have things like video, photographs or music in internal storage, try moving them to the SD card. To do that, either connect to a PC and use Windows Explorer (Windows Key + e) or get a file manager from the Play Store (I use a free one called File Manager).

You could also try going to Settings .. Apps .. All and:

- hitting Clear cache on all apps
- removing apps you no longer use
- hitting Clear data on apps you don't use but can't remove
- hitting Uninstall updates on apps you don't use but can't remove

(options per standard Android, the exact details may differ slightly on your phone)

Since your phone has a recent version of Android, moving apps to SD is not so easy but also, shouldn't be necessary given you have 8GB of internal storage. The rest of the phone spec sounds pretty reasonable, too. 1GB of RAM isn't huge, but it should be adequate.

It may be that some app you've installed is a bit of a hog or is poorly coded. Firefox is a memory hog on Windows, no idea what it's like on Android. You could try removing the apps you installed around the time you started getting problems. Do it one at a time, see if removing any particular app helps.

Also, despite what all the purists claim, I find that occasionally restarting the phone can help. That may be because one of my apps has a memory leak (i.e. uses memory then fails to free it when it is shut down) - one of yours may, too ;)
 
Don't know if this makes a difference or not, but this is a tablet I have, not a phone. Also, when I go to Settings, Apps, it is not transferring to the SD card when I hit "transfer to SD". The SD card still reads as o.oo mgb after hitting the trasfer button. Also, it shows the Internal Memory as 419mgb used and 85 mgb free. How could that be if I'm supposed to have 8GB of internal memory?
 
Are you sure you are not confusing RAM with internal storage there? About 500 MB total sounds like RAM to me (if we assume that some of the RAM has been permanently allocated to the OS and so doesn't appear in that total).


What does it say for internal storage (rather than memory)?

If you are running 4.2 I'm surprised that you even have a move to sd button, since that feature is not supported by the unmodified 4.2 OS.
 
:ditto:

I'm surprised there's a move to SD option if the tablet is running 4.2 - of course, that could explain why it doesn't work :D

(the fact it's a tablet rather than a phone shouldn't make any difference)
 
SiempreTuna said:
:ditto:

I'm surprised there's a move to SD option if the tablet is running 4.2 - of course, that could explain why it doesn't work :D

(the fact it's a tablet rather than a phone shouldn't make any difference)
Click to expand...

Well if the internal storage is mounted as "sdcard" (and the actual sd through one of the "external sd" kludges) I could imagine a particularly brain-dead implementation of move to sd moving it from one location in internal storage to another! You'd hope nobody would be dumb enough to code that, but...

Actually, if you select move to sd does the button change afterwards, so that it now offers to move to phone? Or does nothing happen at all?
 
Forget that last note about , "Haven't used it get...". It went in the wrong place. Was supposed to be for OptimusL but didn't go in box under that text entry. (Guess I don't know how to reply to Replies so it goes uderneath the Reply I was replying to!). (That sounds confusing, doesn't it)? Anyway thanks.
 
To Hadron: OK, First: I was wrong about the version. It is a 4.1.1 and Jellybean. (It also says something about 'Kernel Version'= 3.0.8+, whatever that means)
Second: Internal Storage says, Total=504mgb, Apps= 363 mgb, Available=86 mgb. The features of this tablet said 1Gb of RAM, and 8Gb HDD, so I guess about 500mgb of RAM is being used for the OS, and the other 500mgb is divided up as I listed above?
Third: Turns out it IS moving things over to SD card because a box does come up that says, Return to Tablet. Guess I just haven't moved that much over, only about 12mgb.
Fourth: The 8 HDD is hard drive, right? So,.....what does that do? I didn't see any status numbers on how much HDD is being used, (if that even matters that much with regard to how slow or fast the tablet is moving).
Fifth: I have no idea what your verbiage about, "...internal storage is mounted to SD card...one of the external SD kludges." means. (I had not heard that word before! :-)
So, anyway, am I right on any of this info or does this help you understand my situation more? Thanks.
 
To SiempreTuna, again.
- See my post to Hadron, and you'll see that this is actually 4.1.1 Jellybean.
-No, I don't have any music, video, or photos.
-I did get rid of Mozilla and think may e that helped. So, I guess I can't have two Browsers, huh, to bounce back and forth between?
-When you say "Clear the cache", does that mean all my Apps go away? I don't have that many Apps...Kindle, Nook' Facebook, Overdrive, Email, Camera, Time, Gallery, Playstore, and couple other small things.
-I will check out that File Manager thing. But, doesn't that mean I just have one more App eating up space?
Bottom line, to both Hadron and SiempreTuna, is it because I only have 86Mgb of RAM left available that my tablet wants to run slow? (Although, sometimes it's not too slow. BTW, we have WiFi in the house which is being used for 2 laptops, Sony Bravia internet-enabled TV, 2 cell phones, 2 tablets, 2 Desktops, and it is ATT DSL, not a big pipe cable. If any of that makes any difference). Thanks all for your help.
 
Well I'm still surprised if 4.1 has the option as well :)

That sounds right for the RAM. The "HDD" is what I refer to as internal storage (it's not actually a hdd, just some flash memory, but it does the same job). The reason I mention this is that the device software won't mention hdd or hard drive, but will call it storage. It's used for the OS, for all apps and for apps' data. Probably part of it is partitioned off for the system, so it may say that you have for example 6GB total rather than 8GB, and some fraction of that free.

As for the jargon, it's to do with history. Originally Android devices had a small amount of internal storage and the sd card separate. Then some manufacturers started adding significant internal storage, but to allow the OS to use it for media they called part of it "sdcard", and then used a variety of dirty fixes (which is what kludge means) to add the real sd card to the file system. And while nobody would have designed the file system like this (where e.g. "data" and "sdcard" refer to the same folder), it persists because nobody wants to risk breaking apps which are hard coded for one thing or another.

So if you use a file browser to explore what's on the device, you'll probably find something called "sdcard" which is actually your internal storage, and the real sd card will appear as a separate folder somewhere (with a name like "extsd" or something that refers to "external sd card" - different manufacturers do this in slightly different ways).
 
You can have multiple browsers on the device. I think SiempreTuna just suggested Firefox as a guess at something which might use a lot of resources.

As for RAM, I don't usually worry about that. It should run faster and use less power if it keeps recent apps in RAM, ready to be reloaded, rather than clearing and reloading them, so that's how Android works. It should clear apps out if it actually needs the space. So usually I say let it do its own thing with RAM. However, nothing is perfect so I cannot absolutely rule it out.

What you could do is see whether there are pre-installed apps running which you don't use and disable them (settings > apps > all, select app, press disable button if available). Don't go zapping stuff if you don't know what it does, but if e.g. there are social networking apps you don't use then disabling those may help.
 
Hadron's covered the other questions way better than I could :D so I'll just stick to these 2 easy ones:

roy allen said:
When you say "Clear the cache", does that mean all my Apps go away? I don't have that many Apps...Kindle, Nook' Facebook, Overdrive, Email, Camera, Time, Gallery, Playstore, and couple other small things
Click to expand...

The cache is temporary storage: for example, if you visit a webpage, the browser will save the code, pictures and so on in the cache so that, if you go to another page, then go back to the original page, the browser doesn't have to drag all the information across the network again. Often, however you won't go back to the page or the page will have changed, so this data is effectively taking space for no reason.

All apps do some cacheing and this can use up quite a lot of storage and lack of storage may slow down the tablet. Also, if the app has to wade through lots of stuff that's no longer needed, it can affect performance.

If you go through your apps hitting Clear Cache, that will just tidy up this temporary storage and will NOT stop the apps from working - it may even make some (like the browser) work better.

roy allen said:
I will check out that File Manager thing. But, doesn't that mean I just have one more App eating up space?
Click to expand...

Yes.

If you'd had lots of video, pictures etc, the space you'd have gained moving these would have vastly outweighed the small amount of space File Manager requires (around 6MB so roughly equivalent to 2 photos).
 
To Hadron and SiempreTuna,
Thanks for your suggestions. Reading your replie and looking more thrru Settings I've got a better understanding of how this works. I appreciate it. I'll try to browse this forum regularly to learn more and, of course, I'll probably have more questions to the Forum in the future.
 
Belated welcome to our AndroidForums, Roy! :)

Just wanted to pop-in real quick to let you know that I've moved your thread form the Lounge to our General Tablet Talk area (we apparently don't have a specific forum for your tablet) and to thank our fine members (OptimusL, Hadron, and SiempreTuna) for helping you out.

Cheers!

:)
 
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