Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
By now, just about everyone knows that digital zoom is a great way to ruin a shot on a smartphone or camera. When you zoom digitally, all you’re doing is making the pixels bigger, and that soon leads to fuzzy, blocky, blurry photos. Optical zoom — some call it “lossless zoom” — is different. By…
It depends on where the files are located. If the files are on a removeable memory card, it’s easy! Just shut down the phone, remove the memory card, plug the card into a PC’s card reader and use any of the gazillion free and paid file-recovery tools available. (Examples.) No card reader? You can buy…
That’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it, when your data’s gone — maybe forever! Ugh. But it may not be gone, or at least, not all of it. Google, or your phone maker, may have provided at least some automatic backup services for you. Some third-party apps may have likewise saved some or all of your…
Not much. In fact, probably less than a penny! You can roughly guesstimate it for yourself this way: Note that electricity is usually sold by the kiloWatt hour (kWh) — 1000 Watts delivered for one hour. If you know the Wattage of your phone charger, and how long it runs, you can very easily calculate…
Q*: “When a laptop is plugged in, how does the battery get charged and the laptop get powered simultaneously?” A: There are, in effect, two parallel circuits in most laptops; and the laptop’s OEM charger is sized to provide enough power for both. When your laptop is turned on and is plugged into a wall…
Q*: “How do I fix my laptop? When it is turned on and I plug it in, it will not charge, and will only charge when it is plugged in while turned off. What’s going on?” A: The most common cause for this is an aging battery that draws too much power when recharging; the…
Q: Why is it that when I shut my phone all the way off to save battery and then turn it on again, the battery drains way faster? (via Quora) A: At restart, all your regularly-used phone apps load, start, and try to go online at the same time — email, messaging, Facebook, Twitter, weather…
A reader asks: “Why is my Android phone crying for memory just after a factory reset?” That’s not much to go on, but here are some ideas: 1. Resetting a phone will remove temporary files and random junk files that may have accumulated, but doesn’t otherwise free space or shrink your files. Unless you’ve done…
Reader Al has lost his phone and is nervous about the data it still contains. He used the CONTACT link to ask for help: “My S9+ is powered off as well as being lost. Can a factory reset be made to happen the next time the device powers up?” The S9’s built-in software will indeed…
Reader Aaron used the Contact link to ask: “How can I reset my smartphone without losing data? It keeps restarting.” You’ll have to temporarily move the data to another device (eg your PC; or a cloud-based file storage service like Drive, OneDrive, DropBox; etc.) How you do this depends on where the data is, on…