Do I actually want Denim?

[jimh12345]

8.1 was a complete disaster for my Lumia 521. They should have called it "Windows Phone Loading" because that's what I'm looking at half the time. And if it isn't "loading..." it's "resuming...". The camera now takes so long to get ready that I can only shoot landscapes. And forget about Cortana, she arrives the next day by bus. If I could, I'd dump 8.1 in a heartbeat just to get back to where I was.

Does Denim include any performance enhancements? If not, maybe this is the end of the road for me and Windows Phone. I had to buy a new phone to get from 7.8 to 8, I'm not buying another just to get from 8 to 8.1.

 

[Athull]

Do you have a lot of apps on ur SD card? And what class is ur SD card?
Also have u ever hard reset ur phone after getting wp8.1?

 

[RumoredNow]

...have u ever hard reset ur phone after getting wp8.1?

^^^ THIS ^^^

​Get yer Denim. It's optimizations for yer hardware. Take a backup and hard reset that puppy. You gotta blow that stank out sometimes.

 

[jimh12345]

Very little on the SD card, very few apps. It's a low-end phone but I still have 1.6 GB free, plus most of the SD.
I did some more searching and found some posts suggesting turning off Cortana (there's an off switch in Cortana's settings, not sure what "off" really means, apparently disables some active/background features). I tried that and, surprisingly, it seems to have helped. Will see.

 

[Ma Rio]

I wouldn't have done that, Cortana is a pretty cool feature. But if you're not using her that often, and if your phone slows down - why not.
I'd also suggest updating to Denim and then hard reseting your phone.
Even though it's a low-end phone you shouldn't face any "lag" or similar problems.
And if you do.. well.. though luck.

 

[rfh1987]

I had major issues with 8.1 on my Lumia 820, too. I had to do a hard reset, and that worked wonders for me. The biggest problem for me was battery life. With 8.0, my battery would last a day and a half to two days. After updating to 8.1, I saw my battery draining in half a day, even if I wasn't using it. After the hard reset, I still didn't see as good of battery life as I had with 8.0, but it was much improved to about a day.

 

[Marquis de Faux]

Are you on the Preview for Developers?
The DP was the problem on my 521. I used the Nokia Software Recovery Tool and the lag was gone.