Gadgetory

the Nexus 7 is a great little tablet from Google but it's a little bit laggy after the Android 4.2 update I'm Joe Levi for PocketNow and this is how you can eliminate some of that lag and extend your battery life at the same time with the franco kernel this is my nexus 7 and as you can tell up here by my battery status indicator I've been using this guy a lot mainly streaming some Netflix videos if you would listen to our podcast a few days ago that's because I've been trying to catch up on caprica no spoiler alerts these I'm still on like episode 5 or 6 so getting through it now Netflix is a unique app it uses not only your screen to display what you're watching but it also uses your network connection to stream that information in in short it's very very battery and resource intensive so I had to do something with this to get me a better battery life I also came across something somewhat interesting things are significantly more fluid stuff opens up quicker it's just all-around faster and a lot of the lag that people have been complaining about with the the Nexus 7 Android 4.2 update is gone when I'm running this franco kernel it's wonderful so let me get into that just a little bit this is CyanogenMod 10.1 m 1 that means it is a rooted device that is running a custom wrong it still has a lot of that same lag that people complain about but Franco kernel updater this is the app it's available in the App Store and it costs a few bucks this lets you do a bunch of things first of all it lets you go out and update your kernel and it says here that my installed version is 42 and the latest stable version is our 42 so I'm doing that the first time you run the app you'll want to tap on this to download the latest stable kernel that'll download it install it you'll have to reboot for the changes to take effect once you do that things are gonna be a lot faster a lot smoother and you'll have better battery life like I said that up there that's hours and hours and hours longer than what I normally get so keep that in mind once that's installed that's all you got to do however if you want to go in and do more you can you can come in here and mess with frequencies and voltages it does require Super User permission which of course requires route you can change your maximum frequency up to in this case 1300 megahertz that's 1.3 gig or all the way down to 100 megahertz I've kind of capped that down at 400 the governor is interactive that's the one that it's selected by default and then you can go in and mess around with the GPU I haven't done any of that and in all honesty other than doing those couple things I haven't messed with any settings in here other than setting those CPU settings at boot you can just install this and let it run and it's very very nice next let's look at custom kernel settings we'll open that up again granted super user permissions you can change your i/o scheduler i/o turning turn on F saying I have left this mainly alone one thing that I did do is I've noticed that with this new router I'm using Wi-Fi is a little bit spotty so I ticked that checkbox right there to to basically help out you enable this option I'll read it for you to boost the Wi-Fi signal at some battery cost it's also helpful when your screen is off so I've done that and since then I haven't had any more Wi-Fi problems you can also enable or disable the Tegra screen dimmer this goes through and it saves a lot of battery life when you're watching video by smoothing out the video taking out some of the more bright scenes and making it more more Universal if you don't like that if you think it causes some weirdness in your video just uncheck that and it's good to go it comes unchecked I went ahead and checked it because honestly I haven't noticed all that much I also changed my teep TCP congestion avoidance algorithm over here to Vegas I've seen that before I don't know exactly what it does but I like Vegas so I put that in there if you want to you can change your kernel boot animation to be the the franko kernel boot I like the CyanogenMod one so I will leave that off and really that's all you've got to do there are other things you can do in here you can set power modes you can backup and restore your kernel settings it's really really nice and here's one of the coolest things it's your monitor so you can see exactly what this is do right now you can see that I'm running at thirteen hundred megahertz down to three hundred up to seven hundred I can see my voltages not being responded to and then if you look down here this shows you this is a quad-core device my first two cores are online and working and then the next two are not and then in fact core number one just offline because I don't need it there's not enough stuff going on right now for me to use all three of the all four of the core so it's just using that one so really kind of cool what you can do the app is called Franco kernel updater it is available not for every device in the the Google Play Store if it's not available for your device it either won't show up or won't let you download it if you do download it and can't do stuff with it it's probably because you're not rooted you do need root for that overall very impressed reduces lag significantly increases battery life significantly lets you do a whole bunch of cool stuff very quick very easy install it run it you'll love it if you like what you saw here why not share this with your friends on Facebook Twitter and Google+ give the video a thumbs up for pocket now showing off Franco kernel I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching