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Troubleshooting Your iPhone: Recharge, Restart, Reset, Remove, Reset Settings and Restore

By David Chan

The most common iPhone crash is one where the application you are working in suddenly ceases operation, the screen momentarily turns black, then the iPhone home screen appears. In a slightly more serious manifestation, the crash will result in a complete freeze where the iPhone is unresponsive. Your initial reaction could be... simply yank the battery to cut the power and reset the phone, but there is no batter! But let me remind you that before you do anything to your iPhone, finding out what causes the problem is necessary.

Crashes are most likely to occur when loading graphics-heavy pages, or those with large (in terms of file size) images or music. The Apple has some sort of a contingency in place for lock-ups or a frozen iPhone. Here are the safest ways to troubleshoot your iPhone when an application crashes.

Recharge. Make sure to charge your iPhone with a high-powered USB port, not on a low powered one. Your keyboard USB port (if you have one) is low powered, therefore you cannot charge your iPhone with that port. Only a high-powered USB port will charge your iPhone or you can also use your iPhone AC adapter. You can easily determine if your iPhone is not receiving a power to charge by just looking at the battery image. If you see the red part of the battery image flash three times and then the screen goes black... this is an indication that the iPhone is not charging.

Restarting your iPhone is also a safe way to troubleshoot your iPhone. The iPhone is essentially a small computer and just like a regular computer, sometimes programs freeze and keep you from using the phone for anything else. In this situation, its easy to quit that program. Simply hold down the Home button at the bottom center of the phone for at least six seconds. This should quit the program and return you to the Home screen. Once thats done... restart the phone. To restart your iPhone, hold down the sleep/wake button at the top right-hand corner of the iPhone for 10 seconds. This will bring up a screen asking you to run the slider across the screen to turn the phone off. When you slide the slider to the right, a progress wheel will appear and in a second or two, the iPhone will be off. To turn it back on again, just hold down the sleep/wake button until the Apple icon appears on the screen and then wait for the phone to start up.

If restarting your iPhone does not unfreeze your iPhone, the third option is to reset your iPhone. Sometimes the iPhone gets so frozen that the standard force quit process for programs doesnt work. In that case, youll need to reset the iPhone. To do this, hold both the sleep/wake and Home buttons together for at least 10 seconds. The red shut down slider will show up at the top of the screen and then disappear. Keep holding the buttons. The screen may even go black, but dont let go of the buttons until the Apple logo shows up. When it appears, let the buttons go and the phone will start up normally. The Apple logo signifies that a reset is well done.

Fourth option is to remove some of the content that is not properly synced. Your contacts, calendars, songs, photos, videos, or podcasts are the examples of the content that could be synced to another device. One of such content may be causing your iPhone not to properly. Connect your iPhone to your computer and go to the iTunes site. Change your sync options for each of the following categories: contacts, podcasts, calendars, etc. Click on iPhone in the Source list, then select each tab to change what content is synced, and then click apply.

But if recharging,restarting, resetting or removing content from your iPhone still doesn't solve the problem, try another one - Reset Settings. There are two ways to reset the settings of your iPhone. First go to settings and then general, then reset, then reset all settings. This will reset everything but no data or media will be deleted. Second, go to settings, select general, select reset and choose erase all contents and settings. This will unfortunately remove all of your saved files, folders, and content, so do this with caution. You may want to backup all of your content before attempting this. The second way will put your iPhone back to the state when you first bought it. Again, use the second option with care.

Restoring your iPhone is your last option to fix a frozen iPhone. To do this, use the latest version of iTunes, then connect your iPhone. When it appears in the Source list, click on Restore in the Summary tab. This will also wipe the iPhone and all your information on it.

As I've mentioned, resetting my iPhone fixed my issue and Im even jamming with my iPhone now as I write this. There are lots of ways to fix a frozen iPhone and troubleshooting your iPhone is so easy. Also, remember that you can send a crash report to Apple when your iPhone is connected providing the crash report will enable the iPhone software team to have valuable data that might be rolled into a future update.

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