The First Droid Troubleshooter
This, the inaugural “All Things Droid” blog, goes out to all the noobs out there. I want to explain a couple things about keeping your phone working properly for the long term. A couple of concepts first: any smartphone is more like a computer than not, nowadays. The architecture and software are very similar and even use most of the same types of components, except scales for power consumption and size. The coolest thing about the Android setup is that if there is any component (texting, email, etc) that you don’t like, you can change it or replace it.
OK so, keeping your running well is the first topic. Since your phone is very much a computer, I have found that you need to power cycle every couple of days. This simply means, turn the phone off - just long enough to turn off completely - and turn it back on. This serves to blow out the dust bunnies from the memory. It is these evil garden rascals that can cause system slowing, force closing, and force reboots over time.
Second, for the most part, performance problems generally have two possible causes. One is an app that isn’t playing well with the operating system. The other is an app is isn’t playing well with another app. In the first category we usually find task killers. Generally, task killers are redundant and not necessary and I don’t care that some other rep told you that you need it! When this app was first created it was necessary. This, however, was over three years ago. The first releases didn’t have the same controls as more recent versions. Fact is, the most well known of these, Advanced Task Killer, is still installed and used very frequently. For every installation, the app owner gets a little cash. For every 1000 installs, that figure is significant. Currently, there are more than 50 million installs.
Now if we’re having problems that are hard to identify the source, then we are usually seeing one app not playing well with another. This, of course, is a little more difficult to identify. From here, we usually have to wipe the phone and start over. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a little yucky.
Now, before we effectively erase your life from your phone, I’m going to recommend backing up. I’m not sure why, but the need to back up doesn’t usually strike people as necessary until a catastrophic and permanent loss of information happens. So, I beg - back up, back up, back up! One of the tools that I have found useful is MyBackUp Pro. It’s five bucks. Spend it. This will let you schedule backups at whatever intervals you think might be necessary. If you’re a big picture taker, plug your phone into your computer and copy them to your PC’s pictures file.
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