I have an Asus Transformer TF-101, running Android, which I bought in June 2011 and have used pretty heavily since. Over the last year or two, it has gradually become more and more unusable, often hanging up for long periods, and sometimes crashing. In addition, some apps have become quite unstable – for example, the bookshelf view in Perfect Viewer hung and crashed almost every time I tried to use it, and uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix it.
After spending a lot of time trying to work out if any specific app was causing it to hang, I came to the conclusion that it was the OS itself that was taking the time, and eventually that the only thing to do was to wipe the machine and start again.
I found some good instructions on how to do this on the transformer forums. However, there are a few things I would add to this around the area of backing up and restoring data. I tried to backup using the Asus App Backup utility supplied with the machine, but after resetting I’ve been unable to restore anything from it.
Rather naively, I backed every app’s data into one big file, and copied this onto a network drive. Partly I did this because I was feeling lazy and I wasn’t too concerned about losing any data. Everything important is stored elsewhere on my system or in the cloud, and all I have lost is a few minor things like game scores, unlocked game levels and flags against books I have read.
If you plan to reset your transformer I would recommend that you first look at apps containing important data that you want to keep, and see if they have their own backup system. For example, the most important data I had on mine were music charts stored in iReal, so I backed that up first into my Dropbox using the facility in the app, and lost nothing. Then only use the Asus backup to create backups for apps that have data you want to keep and that you can’t back up any other way. Don’t do what I did and click lots of apps to back them up into one big backup file. Do each app separately, and then copy the backups somewhere else (a network drive, Dropbox etc).
When I tried to restore my big backup file I found that the app would decrypt it and get to about 68% of decompressing it before setting the progress back to 0% (the notification bar then showed -100%) and carrying on until it hit 68% again, at which point it would set back to 0% and continue repeatedly until the machine ran out of space. Incidentally, stopping and closing the app returns the free space. After looking around the Asus forums I concluded that it had probably stored some corrupt data from one of the apps, and that prevents any of it being restored.
Having reset the machine, I then only reinstalled the apps I actually use, which turned out to be a small fraction of those I had installed over the years. It’s been several days since the reset and the machine is running beautifully now. The problems had come on so gradually that I had forgotten just how smoothly it had worked when I first bought it.