Wondering how hard it is to wipe your phone or computer clean and obliterate malware? It’s not so difficult to do, and you don’t even need a geek to help you.
The easiest way to keep adware, spyware and viruses off your phone is to restore it back to factory settings.
To do this, visit the Settings area of your smart phone. It might say Reset or Restore to Factory Settings.
When you do this, it will clear your phone. Then your phone will restart and you will have to enter all of your information just like when you first bought the phone.
One drawback is that you might lose some contacts.
You should keep your contacts up to date and store them on the cloud, but sometimes this doesn’t work for whatever reason and then you have to go searching out people’s phone numbers.
I do this regularly. It’s worth it.
You can also reinstall factory settings to your desktop computer.
The process takes several hours though, because you probably have specific programs that you use and some documents that you should protect by storing them in the cloud or removable storage.
Anytime you decide to clear any device and return to the factory settings, just be aware that you’re going to lose whatever files programs are saved on the device including contacts.
Again, save everything to a cloud before hitting the reset button. Or, make sure that you know your passwords to certain apps and things that you like to have on your devices.
I like to remove all the junk programs from my phone that are automatically installed with the factory settings. So after I reset my phone, I usually go through and delete those.
Doing this will help the performance of your computers and smartphones. It will wipe away unwanted spyware programs.
The less data that your store on your phone in the first place, the less time this will take.
If you know an older person who has a smartphone and doesn’t understand these types of things, it will help to explain it to them or show them how.