Get Rid of the Task Killer

This is a follow up from my last blog posting. It turned out that the HK Video Note 3 phone had a bad motherboard which had to be replaced.

As for the 9.9 inch tablet, it recently became corrupted and would not start. After the HK Video screen, it just stayed on the screen with the word Android on it. That was recovered by the person at the store by pressing on the power and the - volume button to restore the OS on the tablet.

After recovering the tablet, I decided to take a closer look at the default configuration of the tablet and found that it comes with a task killer installed and is rooted. I suspect that most of the issues I encountered is the result of the task killer killing critical processes in the background. As mentioned, I encountered issues where core applications failed and could only be recovered by resetting the tablet to factory mode. I am not sure if effect of the task killer is due to the fact that the table is rooted or because of the OS version. I did not see such dramatic effect on my phone running on Android 2.3.5.

I noticed that applications continue to run in the background and the quickest way to terminate them is to select the multitask button and sliding them out. This will free up memory and cpu usage by these applications. This is probably the safest way to terminate applications in Android without killing critical background processes. The one click button provided on the Asus Fonpad only works some of the times, sliding the applications from the multitask button is more reliable. This button was introduced in Android 4.0. I used to terminate the background processes when I used Windows Mobile 6.1 and found that I helped make my phone more stable, so for now I shall practice this.

There are times you encounter pop-up telling you that some google processes has stopped running and prompts you terminate them. A quick way to fix this is to use the application setting and click clear data and allow Google to repopulate the information. These applications are listed under All category. The ones I cleared in the past are:

  • Calendar Storage
  • Contacts Storage
  • Gmail

As for Google+, you can just uninstall and then reinstall the app from Google Play.

The last item I have not verified is whether using apps2rom and apps2sd will affect the stability of the tablet. Apps2Rom only works with rooted devices and allows you to move core application (such as Gmail) updates back to the rom

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