The battery on my Android phone drains very fast. Is there a way to prevent this?

Romita Jaiswal

The Facebook app for Android is a big battery hog. Stop the Facebook app from intermittently checking for notifications and eating up battery life. Log out of the app and uninstall it. Use the website m.facebook.com instead. Keep the brightness of your phone at a level that you are comfortable with. Avoid too much glare. Turn Bluetooth off when you are not using it. This will save a lot of battery. Do the same for WiFi or else it will keep looking for a hotspot. Close all apps once you are through. Some apps have special access to the Internet, are allowed to send notifications, or keep sound playing in the background. Get the Super Task Killer Free app. This will give you a quick, simple way to close all of your apps at one go.

UPDATE RIGHT

While updating my iPhone 6 to iOS 10.3.2, the screen went black. When I force restarted it, the phone asked me to connect it to iTunes, from where I had to restore the phone. In the process, all my photos were deleted. Is there any way to recover them?

Tapas Ranjan Pradhan

During any iOS update, the screen does go black for a while. If you are updating over a slow connection it stays black for some time. It would have been wise to wait for an hour at least before intervening. If your phone has been backed up properly, go to icloud.com on your computer and log in with your Apple ID. Click on the photos icon and check if your images are there. If they are, they will come back to your phone when you are on a WiFi connection. Next time before you update your phone, please make sure that it has been backed up to iCloud. You can check this by going to Settings and tapping on your name. On the next screen, go to iCloud. Scroll down till you find iCloud Backup. Press Back Up Now. After the backup is complete you can update your phone.

While it is not uncommon to get an error during an update, there are safe ways to recover from it. The iPhone should be put into Recovery Mode while connecting to iTunes. Switch off your phone and press and hold down the Home button on your iPhone. Plug the phone into your Mac or Windows PC while iTunes is running. Release the Home button when you see the Connect to iTunes screen. At this point, iTunes will alert you saying it has detected an iPhone in recovery mode and will let you properly restore your device.

PASSWORD PROTECT

I have Windows 7 Home Basic on my Sony Vaio Laptop. I use a Micromax MMX400R Pocket WiFi 3G Router. When I open the Network & Sharing Centre on my computer, a yellow shield is displayed. It also asks for a PIN number, which I do not have. How do I establish a secure connection?

Niladri Roy

Open your Internet browser on your computer and type 192.168.1.1 in the address bar. You will be greeted with a welcome page. Select My Pocket WiFi Router's Overview Page. Log in with the username admin. The default password for this is password. To configure your WiFi's security, choose Admin Setup. Enter the password of your choice and after that, your WiFi should be secure.

SMART DEFRAG

How do I boost the performance of my laptop that runs on Windows 8.1 Pro?

Bishmita Dutta

One way to make your computer faster is to defragment and optimise your hard drive so that it accesses data faster. Smart Defrag 5 by IObit is a free application that has several modes of defragmentation designed for specific types of data. A Boot Time Defrag mode makes it possible to defrag system boot files. This cannot be done by other defrag tools because they cannot move system files when Windows is running. The tool's Windows App mode will also optimise the folder in which Windows 8.1 apps reside. There is a useful Game Optimise mode that looks into game installation files and moves them closer to each other. Get it from www.iobit.com/en/iobitsmartdefrag.php.

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