iPad 1/2 fix for slow performance (finally!)
After several years of frustratingly bad performance from my iPad 2 and original iPad, I finally figured out how to make it behave reasonably well again.
Before doing this "fix" (you may not like it!), even my iPad's menus were slow to respond. After the fix, everything runs smoothly again.
It turns out that native background apps, especially Mail, can be unbelievably hard on the iPads performance. You wouldn't think that when Mail wasn't the foreground app that it would affect anything --- but it does.
if you have lots of emails (read or unread, doesn't matter), or have a large calendar, and your menus are frequently jerky and the iPad seems to freeze every now and again for a few seconds, welcome to your "solution".
Simply remove your email and calendar accounts from the iPad. The simple act of accessing your mail through the web browser instead of using the Mail app may be all it takes to regain decent performance on your tablet.
For maximum performance, you may wish to continue on, stripping the iPad of every native function you can: turn off notifications, set the background image to black, turn off automatic updates, anything and everything in Settings that does something.
This explains why it is that doing a factory reset makes the iPad works well again. When we reset the iPad, there is no email account attached to the tablet, and everything runs smoothly. We add our email account, and after a little while, the tablet starts downloading and returning the tablet to misery once again.
I was ready to throw both my iPad 1 and 2 out the window, but they are now back in full service.
Hope this helps someone out there.
iPad 2