New advancements are consistently making the technologies at our fingertips faster both in their operations and connectivity. So what happens when your Samsung smartphone starts to run slowly or freezes frequently?
It can cause even the most patient person out there to pull out their hair and scream into the ethers. If you’re like me, I’m sure you demand the highest performance out of all of your devices.
This article is going to take a look at speed in relation to a Samsung phone, some common problems associated with the device, and what you can do if it is lagging and running slow.
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Signs that a Samsung Phone is Lagging or Running Slow
There are some obvious signs indicating that your Samsung Galaxy is running slow or lagging behind. The most obvious one is operating speed. If it takes a while for your phone to boot up or run through applications that once were a breeze, it’s running slow.
If you experience crashes during normal operations, your phone is lagging behind in critical areas that affect performance. These issues can be very annoying but they can also be resolved.
Day-to-day operations on your phone might be the first thing you notice when it starts to slow down. Opening your browser might take longer than usual or editing a photo or video can turn into a very time-consuming task.
Rather than fight these problems or simply accept them, there are some easy steps you can take to try and increase the operating power of your phone and get it back up to speed.
What to Do if Your Samsung Phone is Lagging and Running Slow?
If you notice your Samsung phone beginning to run slow or lag, there are some easy things you can do to try and boost performance. An easy first step is to get rid of any unnecessary, unneeded, or no longer used files.
This can be anything taking up space on your phone. Unused apps can take up a lot of memory as can photos and videos. Go through your library and delete anything you no longer need as a first step.
1. Clean Your Phone
There are also some apps specific to your Samsung phone that can help you clear out space and get your phone running faster.
Depending on the age of your phone and which model you have you can either use the Device Maintenance feature or Device Care for assistance with cleaning up your phone and freeing up memory. These are both good options that are easy to use and built right into your device.
2. Use Safe Mode
To check for hardware issues that may be causing your phone to run slowly, you can boot your Samsung phone in Safe Mode. Safe Mode will keep any third-party apps from running on your device.
These are any apps that you have downloaded after you purchased the device. By isolating third-party apps you can see if they might be the cause of your phone’s issues. This is an easy method you can use by following these steps:
- Step #1: Press and hold the power button on your phone and then touch Power Off
- Step #2: After the device is turned off, hold down the Volume Down and Power buttons at the same time
- Step #3: When the phone turns back on and it will now be in Safe Mode.
- Step #4: If your phone runs faster while in safe mode, you know that one of the third-party apps you have installed on the device is causing your phone to run slowly.
3. Perform a Factory Reset
If you try the two above methods and your phone is still running slowly, you may need to perform a factory reset to get your phone up to speed again. Before attempting this method, you should always make a backup of all of the data on your phone.
You can use an external device such as a computer or external hard drive as well as backup to cloud storage. In order to restore any important information on your phone after a reset, you need to first back it up.
To perform a factory reset on your Samsung phone, follow these steps:
- Open the Settings folder on your phone
- Click Backup & Reset
- Click Factory Data Reset
- Follow the prompts and instructions on your screen and your phone will then be reset to the factory settings, which should fix the speed issues
What Causes Your Phone to Lag and Run Slowly?
The number one culprit for your Samsung Galaxy or other models to lag or run slowly comes down to storage space. Since we all use our phones for so many different things, it is really easy to begin to fill up the memory on the device.
Photos, videos, apps, and anything else you place on your phone can quickly fill up this memory. Even though a lot of newer phones have larger memories, it is still possible to fill them up and have your phone run slow.
When the memory on your phone starts to fill up, it will begin to operate slowly and lag behind. If you reach the point where you have about ten percent or less of your memory available, things can start to seem really, really slow.
This is because your phone just doesn’t have enough memory available to operate in a fast manner any longer.
Your phone can also be running slowly because of hardware issues and not simply because of memory problems. We will look at some steps you can take to check for hardware issues versus memory problems below.
If your phone is fairly new and you don’t feel like you have a lot of information stored on it, there is a good chance that you might have a hardware issue causing it to lag and run slowly.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the methods above are all easy to attempt if your Samsung phone is lagging and running slowly. This is a common problem and it usually has an easy solution.
Memory problems are the culprit for this problem most of the time but if you follow the first two steps and are still experiencing issues, perform the factory reset, and your phone should literally be almost as good as new. Just be sure to back it up beforehand!
Have you ever experienced lagging issues on your Samsung phone? What did you do to fix them? Let us know in the comments below.
