Is everyone ready for the unexpected statement from the Tech Blogger? Sometimes technology is slow, and it bugs the heck out of me.
Ok! So now that’s out of the way, let’s talk solutions. There are various reasons why your technology slows down or stops working entirely. Recently I had a situation where my phone when I did anything, took over a minute for it to respond. Naturally, I was losing my mind while this was going on, but I fell back into my “IT Mr.Fixit” mode and eventually fixed the thing. I knew what to do, but if you have any issues like this, there are a few steps you can take that will likely resolve the issue.
1) Turn off all your apps – Phones, Tablets, Computers, and all other digital devices run on their internal RAM (Random Access Memory), which both help store the data on your device and run the programs for you. If you have too many things open at once, the device you’re operating may slow down. I’m notoriously bad for having way, way, WAY too many apps open on my phone. Every once in a while, my wife snatches my phone from my hand and starts shutting things down. I laugh because it is one of the most straightforward solutions to fixing slowness issues on your device. When you have fewer programs open at once, your device needs less RAM to run the programs you’re using now. Turning off all your apps resets your RAM usage, and then when you open whatever program you need again, it will start working.
2) Check the Battery life – I had an issue with a different device a week or two ago when the inputs I tried to do would take forever to show up. I was trying to be busy using that device, and it wasn’t working the way it usually would, and I was slowly unspooling. I got out of the app that I was in, looked at the battery, and it showed that the device was at 4%…..Sigh….When your device doesn’t have enough energy to perform the actions you need, then plugging it and letting it get up to a full charge will usually help the situation. Incidentally, When I plugged in the device that was sluggish due to lack of power and left it overnight, it worked perfectly fine the following morning.
3) Check for updates – Something that used to bother me was that (as someone who has a foot in both the PC world and Mac World), one system would require you to do updates where the other wouldn’t. The programs would have changes made, but for PCs, for a while there, you wouldn’t have to do the updates, and your system would work properly. In Mac land, if you didn’t do the updates, your system would stop functioning correctly. I prefer the mac system of doing things. If your apps start breaking down, it signals to the user that they need to update their system. In today’s world, with security updates and patches coming all the time, you could leave yourself open to attack or infiltration if you don’t do the updates. Hence, it’s a security thing. That being said, BOTH Windows and Mac have this set up so that if you are using either one of these devices and you don’t update, your device will start to break down. That being said, it would be wise for you to check to see what updates need to be done if your device isn’t working correctly.
4) Turn off your device – I think about the British TV show “The IT Crowd,” where whenever someone called in to report an issue, the person answering the phone would respond with “Hello IT Department, have you tried turning it off and on again?” It’s a funny gag, but it’s remarkably accurate. Our devices run reasonably well most of the time, but if they are never turned off, never stopped, never restarted, they start to break down. Imagine if someone asked you to pull a 48-hour shift at work without breaks or stopping. For computers that aren’t routinely shut down or restarted, it’s the same thing. Restarting your machine does all of the things that we’ve discussed so far in this article. By shutting down or restarting, you’re required to close all your programs, any updates that may be waiting to be updated can do so, and the battery gets a bit of a break.
5) Breathe…Just breathe – It’s one of the most aggravating things that can happen when something that works so well stops working. The power in your house goes out, the plumbing stops working, or your technology stops acting as it should. I don’t know about you, but when I get into those kinds of situations, I tend to have small panic attacks….. ok sometimes they aren’t that small. In either case, when my phone wasn’t working properly, it took me a moment and just breathing to get my head straight and figure out what was wrong. If you find that you tend towards panicking when disaster comes (not, unlike myself), taking a moment to breathe and get yourself centred is always a good idea.
When things go wrong that you depend on, it can be frustrating. Most of the time, 90% of technical issues can be sorted out by turning things off and on again. I find that when there is a problem, and I don’t have a solution, it makes the situation so much worse. Hopefully, you’ve gotten something from the tips in this post, and that will provide you with solutions if you come across a problem like this in the future.
What’s your biggest Technology issue?
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