It has been an exciting day today for various reasons – the council published the lists of candidates for next month’s elections, I picked up my new glasses so I can read the list, and I managed to give the kiss of life to my Nexus 7 tablet.

If you go to the John Lewis website, they are selling an Asus Memopad 7 tablet and nearly every review says something like “I bought this tablet because my Nexus 7 stopped working when Android upgraded to version 5”. I was in the same boat and was on the brink of buying a new tablet but the problem was that what I really wanted was another Nexus 7, but one that works. The 2013 model (that came out a month after I bought mine. Of course) would have been perfect, but that isn’t on sale any more.

Before settling for a different tablet (and I coouldn’t decide between 3 or 4 different options) I trawled the web for possible fixes. I’m always suspicious of these things because on forums there is always somebody who swears that they fixed it all with one thing, which would be fine except it is then followed by loads of others saying they tried it and it didn’t work. Then somebody else says they tried something else and it worked for them, followed by abuse and other alternatives.

Anyway, I tried a few of the suggestions and although it isn’t perfect now it is nearly as good as when I first got it. Unfortunately I didn’t do all these things one at a time to find out which particular action solved the problem but just in case you have a beloved but ailing original Nexus 7 that has been lollipopped by Android it has to be worth trying this lot:

• Turn off location settings
• Turn off dynamic floating preview in the gesture typing settings of Google Keyboard
• Enable developer mode and turn off window animation scale, transition animation scale and animator duration scale
• Enable force GPU rendering
• Set the background process limit to 3 processes
• Clear the cache

I cleared the cache last and it all seemed to be working by then, but its a good thing to do anyway, even if it is a bit fiddly. You have to:

Turn the tablet off

• hold down the power and volume down buttons together
• when the start arrow appears, use the volume to down to highlight ‘Recovery Mode’
• use the power button to select recovery mode
• when the Android icon appears, hold down the power button and press volume up
• release the power button and use volume down to select ‘erase or wipe cache partition’ (be careful not to select the wrong thing like ‘factory reset’!)

The other stuff was quite easy though. You have to go to the settings screen and select ‘About Tablet’ and then tap on the ‘Build Number’ seven times, which enables developer mode and then all those other setting are available to play with.

I know this is all very, very dull to the vast majority who don’t have an original Nexus 7, but you didn’t have to read it did you?