[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
No Haidersaleem. I have been doing computers for decades and sort of know how they work. Windows has relied on the swap file for RAM since the beginning, as well as Linux (Which pretty much "is" Android). The two operating systems differ in the way they manage ram. Windows programs and apps use memory and if real, electronic RAM is full, it will write some of it to swap space and open up room for the new program. This goes back to when hardware like CPUs and RAM were very, very expensive so you did not get much of either. Once you got into the swap file, things would slow WAY down. From browser back to email and you waited while the hard drive light blinked "forever", re-swapping the memory contents for swap file space on the hard drive. When a program in Windows closes, it frees up the memory it was using and clears it out for use.

Linux/Android use the same concept but do not release memory and clear it out, it simply marks the no longer needed memory as "available" so the new process can use it.

Using swap space for memory is just "cheating" to make more RAM but it comes at a cost of speed. sd-cards are electronic and a LOT faster than a hard disk, but you cannot "make up for not enough RAM" with tricks, tweaks, or apps. It is what it is man, an old smartphone, close to 3 years old and a generation past due. The good thing is the Razr was top of the line, spare no expense, very good, very expensive smartphone so it is still useful today.

My phone is good, bro. It runs great on 11/07, always ready, great signal, and I can do more than one thing at once. But it will not break any speed records. The way I battle running out of RAM is to Greenify almost everything and it works quite well. All printed in the Guide. By the time I interviewed enough senior members who always have good running phones while the rest of us were floundering, I was finally able to come to terms with my habit of installing "everything", letting it run wild, and expecting the phone to perform. I confess to still having a lot of apps, but none of them run unless I want them too so the phone is never really "slow", unless I get a bad build or something.

That Online Guide was a year of research in the making, [MENTION=6293373]Haidersaleem[/MENTION] so even if you do not follow it, word for word, but get the idea of not allowing all of your apps to "run wild" at all times, then you will for sure see an improvement.

There you go, buddy. I have been doing electronics all of my life so this is not an uncommon issue. You are really lucky it was dust, dirt, raspberry jam, whatever and not a corroded or rusted mic. Most people do not take the time or realize that you must have ample and proper lighting, AND a very strong magnifier to work on such a small thing as the mic hole on a Razr or you will either see nothing or badly damage the mic by stabbing around with the pin. I always had great lighting and used a 10X headset magnifying goggles. Remember, strong magnification also reduces the light and brightness so strong light is very important. The goggles are great but I have to get my face like 3-4" from the work, making it difficult to work on tiny SMD components. I always wanted surgeon's glasses to magnify things very strong from a good distance of 2', but they cost like $2,500 and were way out of my budget. We did come up with a cheaper way to magnify things to work on them. We took a camcorder with zoom lens and mounted it on a stand facing straight down on a workspace with good lighting. And a monitor TV right next to it. That camera could zoom in and make tiny specs like surface mount resistors (grain of rice) or surface mount ICs (postage stamp with hundreds of connections less than 1 mm apart!) look Giant! The only problem then was working with picks and tweezers required a very, very steady hand. A slight tremor when magnified that large is like an earthquake!

I hated working on SMD electronics at component level but got good at it. You spend all of your time with your face in the work, very tedious, and very tiring. Make a mistake like pull an IC and tear a few copper lands on the boards loose and spend hours trying to fix it, if you could. I only made a couple of those mistakes before learning to never do that again no matter if you have to start over and over!

I worked on a laptop once that would heat up and shut down every 15-30 minutes or so. It took forever to open it, remove the screen, bottom, top plate, keyboard, and finally to the heat pipe and fan. The intake to the fan was at the side of the laptop and had "a cover over it" or filter that fit perfectly. So I got my tweezers and pick to remove it and found there was no "filter or cover", that was solid dust, hair, and fibers, completely blocking the air intake! Once I got it out and reassembled the thing, it ran fine forever after that. The woman who owned it always used it on her bed with lint on the bedspread, animal hair, and dust. So the cooling system ran at a low speed because the bedspread blocked the air ports and sucked up all the dirt, lint, dust, hair, etc. I really needed a good magnifier for that because everything is held together with tiny flat, mufti-conductor ribbon clips. You must flip them back to release the ribbon and they are so small and so fragile that if you are not super careful, you break a tiny plastic clip not worth .03¢ and destroy a $700 laptop because it will not work anymore without the keyboard making a firm connection to the main board. No way to fix it and no way to "order that part".

Replacement Mic costs 6 bucks on eBay but to replace it would dam near kill you. People in this group have replaced batteries, digitizers (Front glass screen) and say it is not "that difficult" but really it IS that difficult. If you worked every day in a factory with all the right tools and equipment, plus experience and training, working on these phones might be doable. But trying it with little to no experience but for a youtube video, guitar picks, a heat gun or really hot hair dryer, and the smallest Torx screws you ever saw and probably do not have is very, very difficult. Then when taking it apart tears the internal camera sticker so it ruins the looks or you must order the darned sticker is a pain, you have to reassemble it or you have no phone while waiting for the order. Plus there are hidden screws. I could not get the battery out even after removing the back and all screws I could find. There was another screw, "somewhere" that I could not find. After I gave up I found a different tutorial and the screw was behind the rear camera bezel, you have to pry it loose to get at that tiny screw. I never did replace the cracked digitizer. Opening the unit and failing to find the hidden screw or disconnect the battery, plus not having the internal sticker that was beginning to tear, took the wind out of my sail. I knew I could do it but this was like taking a 20 mile walk backwards in the Sahara Desert to get the driver's license you forgot and left at some small rest stop. Not gonna do it. Not worth it. :( I got a replacement phone with insurance when the LTE chip blew out.

Good job, Daniel. You fixed your mic. You got your taste of working on microelectronics. Nice work buddy! :good: