- Part 3 of the Mobile Device Troubleshooting.
Let's discuss some application issues and wireless issues.
First of all, the apps won't load.
What if you can't load an app when you tap on it
on your smartphone?
Well, the first thing you wanna do
is you want to check that your screen
is actually working properly,
is your touch screen working properly.
Is it clean?
Do you need to replace the screen protector?
You can try power cycling the device
and remove the battery if necessary
and see if the app will come up then.
But a lot of the times what you'll have to do
is update the app.
It might not load because
you hadn't update to the operating system
and then the app won't actually run properly.
So you have to update the app
or uninstall it and install the latest version.
Now, on the laptop,
you may have seen that MSConfig can disable some apps
and you can also do this in the task manager in Windows 8.
If it's been disabled there,
then you're not gonna be able to run it.
And even if you double click it, it might do nothing
or it might give you an error message.
So you wanna see if it's been disabled in that MSConfig
or in the task manager
and re-enable it so that it will run.
And of course, you can also update it
within the control panel if necessary.
Slow performance.
Slow performance could be because of a lot of reasons.
And we talked about this a little bit.
Applications tend to use a lot of power.
CPU power, battery power,
and all this will slow down your mobile device,
especially, you know, what we're talking about
is the smartphones and the tablets.
Now, you can find out what applications you're running
by tapping on the apps key,
the apps switching button, which is usually here or here.
And it's an actual thing that you can tap.
It's not on the screen.
And that'll show you the list of apps that are running.
If you have 30 or 40 apps running,
and I see this all the time,
well, you need to close some of 'em.
And what you do is you just swipe 'em, either to the side
or on a tablet, you might swipe 'em up and down.
And that closes 'em.
And you'll find that that frees up your RAM
and it frees up a lot of CPU power
and a battery will last longer and all that good stuff.
And they have programs out there that'll close apps for you,
like, the Task Killer and stuff like that.
So, make sure that you close the apps.
That's the first thing.
Because they will cause the device to run slower.
And on a laptop, if you're running Windows,
you can do Alt + Tab
and that'll, you know, hold the Alt button down
and press the Tab key,
and that'll allow you to switch between the applications
and it'll show you how many are running.
The more applications are run,
the slower the system's gonna perform.
That's all there is to it.
Now, it's all these applications
that tend to slow down the mobile device,
eat up battery reserves, cause a power drain,
or even make the device run hot,
especially GPS programs, games, streaming media apps.
But just about any app
could cause a slowdown in performance.
Also you have the aging effect.
Newer apps don't run so well on older devices
because of the lack of resources.
And so, unfortunately again,
there's not that much you can do
besides removing apps that are might be causing the problem
or again, just closing them
and forced closing them, if you have to.
Now, here's another thing, unable to decrypt email.
I see this sometimes as well.
And I see it, I see two different possibilities.
First of all, it could be
that a person is connecting to an encrypted email system
and they might be using TLS or S/MIME
or something like that.
And you need to make sure that the email account
has been configured properly,
whether it's in Windows or Android or iOS,
you wanna make sure
that you are using the right type of connection.
You don't wanna use a POP3 email account
if you're working with encrypted email.
And let's say, the person is using an encryption,
an account that uses encryption,
you don't want to connect to that with a POP account.
You want to use the correct protocols for that.
You're gonna want to use S/MIME,
you're gonna want to use more than just a POP account.
You're gonna want to make sure it's an HTTPS connection
that's using TLS.
So you have to make sure that the protocol is correct
and you're gonna want to check that on your device.
Now, the second part to that is
it could be that a person is getting their email,
but the attachments cannot be decrypted.
And that could be due to the program
that's being used to decrypt them.
If you're using the built in decryption in Windows,
that might not be what's necessary.
You know, EFS might not be what you want to work with.
You might have to use WinZip or another program
that a person used, like PGP to decrypt those attachments.
That gets more into the security side
and into the encryption and decryption in general.
So, anyways,
if you're unable to decrypt your standard email,
make sure that you're using the right protocols.
Intermittent wireless connections.
Well, we talked about that a lot already.
And you know, you're gonna wanna check for interference,
you're gonna wanna check the distance
of the device from the wireless access point,
and you're gonna wanna check and make sure
that your antennas are installed
are set up in the right direction
if you can use an antenna on a laptop.
And you may want to actually consider
upgrading the wireless card on the laptop.
But generally we're talking interference and distance.
That's what you're looking for with intermittent wireless.
And again, we talked about that a lot in other lessons.
Finally, GPS not functioning.
Well, if GPS doesn't function,
then you can't use your location services.
The first thing you wanna do is you wanna turn on GPS
in your settings.
Either GPS or location services or Geo tracking,
that type of thing.
It depends on what you need.
But you turn on GPS in the system,
that's the first thing you check if it's enabled.
And then you might also have an application
that requested to use GPS,
but you didn't allow that,
you dis-allowed the application access to GPS.
So, you might have to enable that for the individual app.
In addition, you wanna check the entire wireless settings.
Maybe the device is in airplane mode
and that's why GPS is not functioning.
And there might be a security policy.
You know, if you have a BYOD type of environment
where you're bringing your own device into work,
the network administrator might put a policy on the network
and all devices will have GPS turned off
when you enter the building.
You never know.
So, there's a couple things to check for that.
And that's the end of the sub-listen.