A friend gave me a Gotab lite 9" (GBT9) tablet and asked me if I could do anything to improve the performance on it. Their main issues being the low initial boot and slow performance in loading and switching applications.

The tablet runs Android 4.1.1. It's an old 2012 model tablet with limited storage 8GB but only 1GB system partition and even worse just 512MB RAM. I think the RAM is the problem as even at idle there is only about 60MB available, which doesn't give much scope for loading and switching apps.

I have had a look at what is installed on there and apart from Skype it's practically at stock, so very few applications yet still performs poorly.

So are there any general recommendations for improving performance of a very basic/limited Android tablet?

I was thinking like things I can change in the appearance of Android OS, any animations or special effects etc that can be disabled?

Reducing running processes - is there an easy way I can find out what processes are non essential and therefore can be turned off?

Any advice greatly appreciated

You could always see if there is a lite custom firmware you could install onto it?

Short of reflashing OS as Koantemplation says (and this could be hard to do), then really there is nothing you can do.

you could take a look at what apps are loading and running at the start, if you got into apps and swipe across you should be able to see what is running and how much memory it is using.

Yes, I have done this as well as clearing cache on each app. However there really isn't that much on it anyway, it's pretty much factory spec so I'm thinking the main limitation is the pretty dire specification sadly.

That said, is there anyway you can stop certain apps starting with the machine (on boot) like you can on PC? That might help a little as there are a few factory supplied apps on there that have no purpose I am aware of...

Yes if you swipe across to all apps there is usually an option to disable an app, it may ask to uninstall any updates first though