I have an old iPad 2 that I’m not quite ready to give up on. After all these years, is there anything I can do to improve its performance?
There a bunch of “cosmetic” setting you can turn off to improve performance.
“Reduce Motion” is one of them.
You can also make sure that Apps don’t have permission to run in the background (Facebook, etc.).
Over the years, iOS updates can leave behind some “cruft” that’ll slow things down. My iPad2 improved in performance, battery life, and stability by doing the iPad equivalent of a nuke and pave reinstallation, aka a clean install or factory restore.
Apple’s instructions are here. You will need another computer running the latest version of iTunes to backup your data from the iPad as well as to do the “restore” process.
On my iPad2, iOS 8 was horrible, but iOS 9 was better, performance-wise. As iOS versions continue to come out, they do include more features, so even a fresh installation will not be as speedy as whatever version of iOS your iPad had when you bought it.
Thanks. I will give these a try.
The one I have at work as a portable document viewer is still running iOS 6, but even at that its shortcomings in RAM and general speed are made painfully obvious by my latest phone. Zooming and panning around 36x48 pdf’s (blueprints) is a horrible experience of wait 5 seconds at a time for the damn thing to fetch that portion of the file from what seems to be a tape drive because it can’t fit more than one screen’s worth of display in any faster form of memory. Standby battery life is still fricking amazing though.