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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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On mobile devices, the term soft reset describes restarting the device,

whether you do it from within the OS or with hardware buttons on the device.

If the device still won’t restart, confirm the soft reset procedure in the

manufacturer resources; if you know you’re performing it correctly, you can

force a device with a removable battery to power down by removing the back

cover and the battery.

Much like a reboot on a traditional computer, you can fix all kinds of

strange behavior on a mobile device with a soft reset. I’m listening to Spotify

on my Android device as I write this section, for example, and when I got

started this morning the playback was stopping every few songs; I performed

a soft reset and now it’s working fine. Unfortunately, the soft reset is the easy

reset to remember correctly; we’ll continue this discussion in the “Reset to

Factory Default” section coming up in a moment.

Uninstall/Reinstall Apps

Uninstalling and reinstalling apps can be an important troubleshooting

process. You can uninstall apps through either the app store they were

installed with or the device’s application manager; you can also, of course,

reinstall them via the app store. If the user started having trouble shortly after

installing a new app, uninstalling it to see if the problem goes away is an

obvious way to rule out a potential cause. If they’ve been successfully using

the app, make sure to jot down important settings and back up their data if

possible before you uninstall it.

The problems you can fix or troubleshoot by uninstalling and reinstalling

aren’t always as obvious as this. If a user has had an app for a long time and

it only recently started acting up, it’s possible the app’s developers released a

bad update; after a bad update, the app might not work at all, or it might work

fine if you uninstall and reinstall it. Sometimes this can be a no-win situation

for a tech—what if the only fix to a user’s problem is removing an app they

use daily until its developers fix a problem?

Reset to Factory Default

This other reset—known by many names such as hard reset, factory reset, or

reset to factory default—will clear all user data and setting changes, returning

the device (well, its software) to the state it was in when it left the factory.

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