[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Keep your phone's system light

One thing most of us know by now is that to get optimized performance out of our Razr phones, we must cut back on running processes, apps, and things that use memory and CPU load at a time when they are not necessary. It took me months, and months, and MONTHS to understand this enough to realize that it really IS necessary and will make a definite improvement with performance on our phones. If you install CM11, load up your apps, and allow it to "run wild", willy nilly, do what it wants and expect for it to respond immediately to our commands and wishes, you are dreaming.

I have been primarily focusing on using Titanium Backup to freeze apps and services you will never use. Freeze instead of uninstall because each update restores the items you have removed. Then use Greenify Donation Pack to hibernate all of the remaining apps and services that you do need so they sleep, do not use ANY system resources, but are on "stand by" to check your mail, receive your Facebook and other social media messages, keep your calendar and contacts up to date, etc..

I am playing with a new toy now. Almost everyone knows and uses ES File Explorer File Manager as the best rooted file manager you can install. Not only do you get all the root functions a File Manager can offer, you get cloud and WiFi access to your storage in other places. Very nice, very good app. But there is a companion app that I never really played with, it shows up in ES File Explorer Tools menu and you will be asked to install it if you want to try or use it. Okay, this time I went for it. One thing I

really, really want

(Don't the Spice Girls sing that song? Oh yeah, "Wannabe".) is a "Task Manager" like Windows that shows every single running task, be it a program or service, percent CPU, and information about it as well as the ability to kill it.

We do have "something like that" in CM11, /Settings/Apps/. But it is cumbersome and does not really do all of these things I want in a simple, easy to use interface. So now I am trying ES Task Manager(Task Killer). This could be a really useful app or "just more straws on the camel's back". I am going "very lightly" with this app, trying it out, and then testing apps that were killed or disabled in an effort to "optimize" the phone. It put Dropbox to sleep and one thing I DO WANT is instant picture upload to dropbox and my PC every time I take a picture or video instead of 5 minutes more battery life. I thought for sure that it would fail. It didn't. I got my test picture delivered to my desktop PC within a minute. I still think this would have failed had I not used Greenify to allow hibernated apps to wake up upon demand for a task it was called for.

I tell you, this ES Task Manager is a pretty powerful tool. It has 6 different slide to the right windows that do different things. I did gain more system power and resources with it, some of which I did not like in the "Power Optimizer" and easily reverted like turn Bluetooth back on, Haptic Feedback (Vibrate to acknowledge a change state), 3G/2G OFF to get my 4G back, and GPS back on. (I use the GPS High Accuracy because sometimes I misplace my phone and with the Google Device Manager, I can locate the phone and even make it ring, loud and LONG so that I can find it.). One good thing the Power Optimizer did was allow me to properly set my Auto Brightness the way I want it.

One thing I DID check is to go to /System/Apps/Running shows only 7 apps and ES Task Manager is NOT one of them. The attached screenshot shows ALL of my currently running apps and there is nothing off screen. What you see is what it is. Only 7 running apps is pretty sweet. Plenty of horsepower left to actually "do stuff" with this phone, anytime I want. :)

This ES Task Manager(Task Killer) is possibly a very good tool to have. You can manage your startup apps with it, no need for things like AdAway to run at startup because all it does is update the hosts file, that I do manually anyway. cmupdater is another worthless thing to run at startup or at all, unless you are doing an OTA update manually.

I am running out of character space in the guide to go into detail about it and I am experimenting with it now. Just thought the rest of you might want to try it out and see what you think of it. Please post your experiences to the thread as feedback to help with recommending this app or not. Be sure to give it a fair chance before you blackball this app, there is learning curve associated with it, just like any other app. 'night guys! :D

EDIT:

After seeing my own screenshot, I went back and Greenified APM+. That is a terrific Xposed Module that only modifies the Power Menu and then does essentially "nothing". It does have "Anti-Theft measures that you can use and for that reason, it might be a good idea to leave it running. I do not use the anti theft stuff so for me, that is one less straw on the camel's back. :)