Supercharge your Samsung tablet or phone with our top tips for solving a slow Samsung Galaxy tablet. From getting rid of Samsung bloatware to updating your Samsung tablet, we have advice to help speed up your Galaxy tablet.
We also have more general advice on speeding up an Android tablet, as well as the Samsung-specific advice below. We recommend checking out both articles.
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Update a Samsung Galaxy tablet
Make sure your Samsung tablet is up to date and running the latest available version of Android. This can help it to deal with bugs or security issues. Check for System updates by tapping Settings and scroll down to Software update. Tap Download and install to see if there's an update.
Make sure Auto download over Wi-Fi is turned on so that updates are automatically added to your tablet.
Delete apps and data from a Samsung tablet
With too many installed apps, your tablet’s performance can suffer, so get rid of all the ones you no longer use. Removing apps frees up storage space and – importantly – cache memory, helping your tablet to run faster.
Want some more help with speeding up your tablet? Our friendly tech team can help you with one-to-one support on a range of tech issues. Find out more here.
To uninstall an app on your Samsung tablet, sweep up from the bottom to show all your apps, and then on the app you want to remove, tap and hold its icon and then tap Uninstall on the box that pops up.
You can help to speed things up further by offloading large files from your tablet. You could move your photos, videos, or music to your computer, your cloud storage or a microSD card if your tablet has a card slot.
Get rid of apps
When you first set up a Samsung tablet or smartphone, part of that process offers to install a range of apps from Samsung. Everything in that list is automatically ticked, but you can do yourself a favour by reviewing that list then and unticking any apps you don't want, as not all of them can be uninstalled later.
You'll be nagged on the next screen about any apps you've unticked, but you can click Skip at this point.
If your tablet is slowing down and you can't uninstall a Samsung app, try disabling it. Go to Settings > Apps and tap the app you want to stop. On the next screen, tap Disable at the bottom.
Clear space on your hard drive
If your tablet is slowing down it could be that its hard drive is filling up, so it's worth checking via the Storage setting.
Go to Settings > Battery and device care > Storage.
On the next screen you'll see how much storage you have available and what's taking it up, any files in the Recycle bin, any apps the device thinks you're not using, any cached files or duplicate files, and any particularly large files: you'll find big video files under that setting, for example.
Review what's taking up space on your drive and consider deleting any that you don't need, or move them to cloud storage to free up space on your tablet.
You can also clear the cache here: this is where your tablet stores versions of files to make them load faster, but if the cache is full, clearing it can help speed things up more generally.