How to 'force restart' your phone: Talking Tech podcast

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Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Happy Monday, by the way. You've likely heard your IT person at your office say this before, say your computer is acting really weird, they might tell you, "Did you turn your computer off and turn it back on again?" Typically, that works. Sometimes your computer is acting funky and you just turn it off, turn it back on, it works. This is the same thing that happens with our smartphones too. If our smartphone's acting funky, the quickest fix is usually turning it off and then turning it back on again. There are times that you might need to go a step further. You might have apps that keep shutting down every time you try to open it, you may have like your browser's moving a lot slower than normal, just feels really unusual. This is a good time to consider what's called a force restart or a hard reset.

I write about this in a story you can read on tech.usatoday.com. What this does is it goes pretty much a step further than just turning the phone on and off, it fully resets your phone. It's almost like taking the battery out of the phone and then popping it back in. One important thing though to keep in mind is, when you hear reset, people think, "Oh, oh, this is going to reset my phone to the way it was when I first opened it and took it out of the box." That's not what this is, very different. What this does is it's a bigger reboot of your phone basically. It allows it to get back to running normal if it's running in a really weird way.

So I break down the steps to do this. Let's start with the iPhone. iPhone's a little funky because there are different models. So depending on your model, we'll determine how to do this. Let's take some of the newer models, for example. So if you have an iPhone 8 or later, what you'll do is you'll tap the volume up button, then the volume down button, then you'll press and hold the side button on the right until you see the Apple logo pop up.

Now, you might see an option to power down your phone, ignore that. You're going to see it go from that to black and then the Apple logo pops up. It's going to take a few seconds, don't panic if it doesn't happen immediately, it takes a few seconds. But hold that button down and keep it down. Once you see the Apple logo pop up, you're good to go. The processes are similar on older phones. I detail this in my story, which you can check out on tech,usatoday.com. And just subtle changes in the buttons you press and things like that, but it's the same thing. You're basically going to do those steps, you hold down a button, wait for the Apple logo, and you're all set.

If you own a Samsung Galaxy phone, you'll press and hold both the volume down and the power button for about seven to 10 seconds, and that'll force a reboot. If your smartphone or your Galaxy phone doesn't have dedicated power button, then you're going to hold the side and volume buttons down for that same amount of time. There's also a cool option on Samsung phones. If you have one, you can actually reboot your phone in safe mode. So what that does is it disables a lot of the third party apps. It's Similar again to what you might do on a PC or a Mac, and you can really inspect what's wrong. If it's like a rogue app that's acting weird, you can focus on that app, get it out of there, and then you're back in business. So it's a nice extra thing you can do if you have a Samsung phone. But again, it's a very nifty tool, it's a nice option to have if your phone's acting weird. And in a lot of cases, it's a really quick way to cure whatever's ailing your phone at the time.

Listeners, let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas, any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter at brettmolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. Also, would you like Tech News delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to the Talking Tech Newsletter, go to newsletters.usatoday.com for more. You've been listening to Talking Tech, we'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How to 'force restart' your phone: Talking Tech podcast