Screen / apps icons unresponsive

[AliWonder]

My phone is becoming more & more unresponsive; often I tap an icon on the screen, or the bottom left-hand 'back' button & nothing happens; it just doesn't respond, like it's frozen up. Sometimes I click on something - e.g. Contacts, messages, photo album, & for some time the screen just goes black like it cannot fnd the content; it eventually comes up, but once or twice it didn't come up at all & I had to switch the phone on & off again to make it work again. And sometimes I get a message saying that certain app's are 'not responding'. Is this a known problem? is there any way of 'refreshing' the screen, like I used to be able to do with my Nokia? I have an Xperia S with ICS. Thanks

[Thommo]

This sounds like your phone is using the full memory in the background to do tasks and when you ask it to do a task for example tapping contacts it will take a while as it has joined a que and is waiting for the phone to do the other tasks before in can implement your task - Computers etc can have the same issue hence why on some say programs it has a minimum requirement of say 3GB of Ram or memory,

If your phone is doing this then and I am assuming you have a lot of apps running in the background or you have installed an app that had or has a virus or spyware etc attatched to it - Despite what some members on here say that antivirus apps aren't needed then I would beg to differ - I own an IT security company and I know 1st hand that there is viruses and spyware out there and are becoming more common as more and more are being made to solely for the Android operating systems even Sony themselves have acknowledged this and have it on their warranty page

[AliWonder]

Thanks; I normally have NO apps open - I hardly use them. I often check in the 'apps running' screen, & find that there are some apps that I NEVER even use that switch themselves on - such as Google Maps & 'Video unlimited', & I have to switch them off. I tried to uninstall the 'Video unlimited' but it won't let me, even though I don't use it or want it. For the RAM at the moment it is showing me '352MB used; 282MB free'; does this seem ok?

For the anti-virus; what should I install? There was some McAfee trial thing on the phone but it's expired. Should I pay for the full version, or is there anything free that is decent? Many thanks.

[Thommo]

The Ram I speak of isn't what you have said above think of that as Hard drive and think of the larger 32GB quoted as an external Hard drive - The Ram I speak of is what you see in a Pc or Laptop etc, It's the sticks or strips of normall Green or Blue memory and in some cases Red - This is what I am referring to as Ram as it is this that stores commands ready for the CPU to process now on a phone it will probably be a microchip Pc's also have this known as L2 or L3 cache if this is being used by spyware etc then it will not be able process new commands,

As for an Anti virus Avast free version has been bench tested and came 3rd the top 2 are paid for only apps so uninstall Mcafee and install Acast free version found here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avast.android.mobilesecurity&feature=search_result...

Bench test means all known viruses have been tested and I think the last test found 98.6% or 96.8% of them the top 2 managed slightly higher by about 0.6%

[AliWonder]

Ok, will try the Avast anti-virus - thank you very much!