How can I make iPad 1 operate faster

You can't. It is not upgradeable in any way.

Used Apple products are sought after by many electronics recyclers, developers etc. You'd be surprised what you can receive for your original iPad outright, or as a trade-in towards an iPad 2. If you haven't used on yet, you may be pleasantly surprised how fast they are 🙂

My ipad is getting worse, very slow when i updated it to iOS 5.01. Please provide some support, e.g. an app to kill some background applications. I don't want to buy new device. I've bought it less than a year. Please Apple.

As the result of months of web surfing and testing, I could narrow down the issue at is causing performance on all our original iPads! One would say to turn all the iCloud features off, but I have found that there are major performance bugs in contacts and calendars! Turn them off in the iCloud part if the settings. This, alone with disabling spotlight search results in no keyboard lag and no "checkerboard effect" in safari whe pages won't load fast enough! I hope this helps everyone as it did to me!