One Cause of Slowdown in Android Phones

I think many Android phone users are misled into flashing their ROM's frequently and do so as a routine to improve their gradually slowed down phones. Custom ROM's have their indisputable utility but without understanding the cause of system slowdown, changing the ROM only obscures the diagnosis by introducing new factors into the problem and thus it might not solve the problem at all.

I used a Moto Milestone, one of the early popular Android phone, with Android 2.2 a.k.a. Froyo (the ROM was built for some European carrier because Milestone, the GSM counterpart of Moto Droid, was not sold by any carrier in the US). The system was very responsive when I wiped all the data and first flashed it on. Then noticeable slowdown appeared as time passed. After trying a few things, I discovered one simple (and easy) cause:

much of the slowdown is due to the growth of user generated data and that some of them are regularly loaded into memory for access (via content providers).  

Thus by regularly (backing up if you want to keep the data and) clearing call log, messages, etc, I restore the speed on my phone with ease (without worrying about what is in a new ROM). With the exponential growth in phones' RAM, this will become less a problem and if the programmer practices more care and loads only a small portion of all data at a time: for example, the user does not usually need to see the call history from last week everytime he or she goes into call log. 

Insyde BIOS Advanced Settings

I like to focus on details, often to a painstaking degree: I feel the constant need to adjust the balance between the details and the whole. So when I got my new laptop, I quickly went its BIOS settings and tried to examine all its available settings and whether they are fine tuned for the best performance (CPU states/voltages, memory latency/clock, etc are crucial to achieving this goal).

So I got a HP Pavilion dv6tqe recently and its BIOS is from Insyde. I have never seen this vendor: back when I got my last laptop, I only saw Award, AMI, and Phoenix BIOS around in the market. Anyhow, that only shows how remote I have been from the field. The BIOS settings very much disappointed me with its about ten options with the only meaningful one being the boot order configuration. I went online and searched for something relevant to enabling advanced settings on Insyde BIOS and there are quite some discussion around this topic, including flashing a modded firmware to BIOS and this wonderfully simple solution of

pressing the A key (for "Advanced"?) after pressing the F10 key (this gives your the BIOS setting page).

I verified that this works with my BIOS with BIOS version F.13 (update: and F.1B). And here is a screenshot.

Notice that there are two new tabs named Advanced and Power.

There is one thing to note though: if you set a BIOS administrator password (which you should and many people forget to do), pressing the A key cannot get you to the advanced mode. You will have to clear your admin password and follow the procedure.

Google Multiple Sign-in

Google multiple sign-in is a handy feature if you have more than one Google account and you want to switch between them without logging in and out every time. (This log in and out action is still needed for a technical reason which I will point out at the end.) I use it often to switch between my accounts when checking emails (in this way, you can easily have multiple Gmail storage). Note that you need to enable multiple sign-in for your accounts at the account setting page before you can use this feature.

The switch account button is highlighted on the right.

On the list of signed in accounts, the one that you first signed into is marked with (default).

Although this feature is convenient, it is not supported uniformly well across all Google services. In any case, all sites will recognize your account as the default account which is the one that was first signed in and some of them will let you switch between signed in accounts. The implementation on the popular services such as Gmail, Google docs, and Google Calendar are seamless but not so for some others like Google Wallet (a.k.a. Google checkout). In fact, it can be really confusing sometimes.

If you want to change the default signed in account, there is no click-a-button method to accomplish that at the moment (which should be implemented soon by Google I hope) and so you have to log out (which logs you out of all signed in accounts) and log into the account you wish to make default.