[Galaxy S III Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Benaholic:
So, it's been bothering me for a while but my now 2-year-and-2-month old Samsung Galaxy S3 always just runs incredibly slowly. Not only that, but I tend to burn through the battery easily within 6 hours. For the past year and a half, or so, I've had to resort to carrying around two spare batteries with me as it has a tendency to run out of charge in the middle of the day, let alone if I'm out at a music festival or something. I'm not a particulaly heavy user, as in I rarely play video games on my phone, nor do I really watch videos or ever use bluetooth. Occasionally I do use GPS or WiFi, but I try to keep them turned off when I'm not using them. I tend to use my phone for music when I'm in the car, or texting / whatsapp / occasional snapchatting, or checking Pulse News or my internet banking. I don't have a particularly huge amount of apps installed, I don't think. And I regularly hold the Home button, & press the close-all-apps button to make sure that they're not running in the background.

Yet, my phone is so laggy. It's like there's a constant 3 or 5, or even sometimes 10, second delay for whatever action you've initiated to actually occur. You'll press Messages, and it'll take about 4 seconds for my text messages to show up. You'll press Home, and it takes about 3 seconds for it to close. Facebook just took about 8 seconds to load. It doesn't sound alot, but it can be quite infuriating when you're trying to get things done in a hurry. It's even worse when apps are running in the background!

So, I got to check my running processes and there's just loads of things running that both don't appear to be running when I hold the Home button but also shouldn't be running because I haven't used them in forever. It appears my phone has approximately 850MB of RAM, yet my phone tends to ALWAYS run at around 725MB used (currently it's at 751MB, as can be seen in the screenshot attached). But when I do go through the list of things running, the right hand side it tells you how much RAM is supposedly being used. Yet if I total up all of the RAM being used by all of the apps that are apparently running, it only comes to about 300MB. So where the heck is this other 450MB of RAM being used?! THIS is what is slowing down my phone, I think.

Not only that, but there are things in this list that are running that shouldn't be running, & I don't understand why they are. Facebook, sure I can understand, in case you get a notification or something. But TuneIn Radio... I'm not listening to the radio at the moment, nor have I used the app in weeks (and my phone has been restarted numerous times since then), why is it running? S Voice, too? Video Hub? Google Play Music, I've never even used it. And then there's loads of things I haven't got a clue what they are, like Exchange Services, ELM Agent, SmartcardService, etc. Now I understand it's like a computer, where there are a number of background processes that have to run to make the OS work, but why are all these other apps running that I'm not using?!

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Furthermore, I've started trying to use Google Now because I would like to get a Moto 360 (but I'll ask questions about that in a seperate thread). So, it seemed to work fine a few weeks ago. It gave me stocks, news updates, ETA to work or home, started remembering where I was parking. But now a few days ago I go back to it, after not using it for a little while, & it's all reset; Asking me to set it up again. So I did, & it mostly works but I can only ever seem to get the first "page" of cards up. When I click "More" at the bottom I just get an endless spinning circle & then the message "No Internet Connection - Content was last updated X minutes ago" appears as the top card, when infact I know I do have an internet connection. Exiting the app, closing it down, & then re-opening does not fix the issue either. I'm at a complete loss as to what to do.

Furthermore, it always asks me to "Improve my location: For more accurate location, let google search for Wi-Fi connections, even when Wi-Fi is off." I don't understand how this works, and what it's trying to do? If I turn it on, is that not going to be effectively the same as leaving my WiFi turned on at all times? Well, except without the benefits of being connected via WiFi. It's just going to drain my battery more, as leaving WiFi on usually does.

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So tldr:

- Why is my RAM mysteriously using 450MB that I can't vouch for? Where is it going? How I stop it?

- Why is Google Now not letting my manually update the cards?