Computer^News^FAQ

Update: Re-Spring iPhone 4S with Siri

1. Hold down the Home button
2. Say “Restart”

Restart your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad

1. Hold down the Sleep/Wake button until a red slider appears on the screen.
2. Slide your finger across the slide and the iPhone will turn off.
3. Turn the iPhone back on again by pressing the Sleep / Wake button until the Apple logo appears on screen.

Reset your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad

1. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least 10 seconds.
2. Ignore the red slider that appears on the screen and keep holding both buttons until the Apple logo appears.

First: Assess your usage!

Fixing Battery Life

• Restart/reset your device. If you haven’t rebooted in a while, give it a try. There could be a rogue process or something else doing what it shouldn’t be doing, and a restart can often fix that. (Here’s how to reboot)
• Power cycle. About once a month, and certainly if you’re having problems, you should completely drain your iPhone or iPad’s battery — drain it until it shuts down on its own — and then charge it back up to full.
• Restore your device as new. The single biggest cause of battery life problems with iOS 5 occurs when they are restored from backup and not set up as new devices. Whether it’s cruft or corruption, a clean install as a new device — incredible pain in the butt though it may be — is usually the best fix for any battery life issues. This is the nuclear option. You will have to set up absolutely everything again, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever.
• Go to the Apple Store. Sometimes you do get a lemon, or your iPhone or iPad develops a real problem that only Apple can solve by either swapping it for another device or otherwise figuring out a fix.

Saving battery life

• Turn off Siri’s Raise to Speak. Go to Settings, General, Siri. Readers keep telling us this has helped them with battery life due to accelerometer issues.
• Turn of Ping. Go to Settings, General, Restrictions, (Enable Restrictions). Again, readers say this prevents undue push. And who uses Ping anyway?
• Turn off Location Services. Go to Settings, Location Services, and turn off any app you really don’t need tracking or using your location. You can also turn off system settings, and location based time seems popular with our readers as a battery suck.
• Turn off Push Notifications. Likewise, go to Settings, Notifications, and turn off any app you don’t care to be alerted about.
• Turn of Notification Center widgets. Stocks, and particularly weather in Notification Center seem to be causing our readers some battery grief. Since weather can be location-based now, the potential is there for more battery abuse.
• Kill power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter “jiggly” mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background, especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or navigation (like TomTom).)

• Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute
• Turn off any extra sounds, like keyboard clicks
• Turn off the iPod EQ
• Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music
• Turn down the screen brightness
• Turn off Bluetooth when not using it
• Turn off Wi-Fi when not using it
• Turn off 3G when not using it (Not possible on iPhone 4S)
• Set all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to “Fetch” (turn off Push)

Plug in your device