Tech Tips

17 tech tips to help solve common issues

17 tech tips to help solve common issuesSome common complaints never seem to go away: issues with transfer & backup of contacts, doing more with PDF files and keeping your data privacy intact. Karan Bajaj offers some quick advice to keep these issues in check.Contacts can be automatically synced with your Gmail account, so the latest backup will always be available if you enable this. For iOS users, if you have added your Gmail contacts and switched on Contacts sync, your iPhone and Gmail contact will also auto sync

To be on the safer side, you can export your entire phonebook as an editable CSV file and then keep it as a backup in Google Drive or any other cloud storage

To manage your contacts, you can edit it on your phone or in Google contacts and it will be updated everywhere. Google contacts also gives you the option to find and merge duplicates from its web interface

If you want to make bulk changes to your contact database, you can export the entire phonebook as an Excel sheet. Once you are done editing, you can either choose to remove all data from Google contacts and then import the edited file or you can import the edited file first and then choose to find and merge duplicates

Wiping The Phone Securely

What do you do with your old phone? Many will give it to a friendrelative or exchange sell it. But how do you make sure your personal data is not accessible to anyone else?

While giving away the phone, standard practice is to do a factory reset from the settings page. Most of us do not realize is that even after a factory reset, your data can be recovered from the smartphone

To prevent data recovery after you have done a factory reset, copy random dummy data on your phone (random large video files, photos etc.) -this will over-write the storage of your phone. Now do a factory reset again -anyone trying to extract data from the phone will only be able to get the random dummy data your last stored

Another way is the use the iShredder app (Free, Android only) that securely wipes all data on your smartphone with military grade security

If you have a microSD card installed on the phone, we recommend that you remove it from the phone before giving it away to protect your data

Identify Fake SD Cards

While it’s easy to identify fake smartphones from the software, it’s not as easy with storage cards. Fakes have flooded the market and there are chances you will end up with a fake card not just online but also from your local store

The first thing to do is check the official MRP label on the packaging.Genuine products have an MRL label with details including contact information of the company in the country, warranty information, importer month and year as well as contact details of the importer

You can use a free app called SD Insight from the Play Store to get details about your microSD card.Install the card, run the app and it will show you the brand name, model number, capacity, and manufacturing date of the card. If it shows unknown brand or incorrect capacity, its probably a fake card

Another way to test the microSD card is by checking data transfer speeds. A free app called A1 SD Bench lets you run speed tests on the card and lets you compare results online to identify differences

If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is! A 200GB microSD card for `999? That’s a fake. Know the prices of storage and you can avoid being scammed

Managing PDF Files

Your email inbox is full of PDF files -your phone bills, utility payment receipts, bank statements or your work related documents. While you can easily view these files using a reader (Adobe, Foxit Reader), or even a browser, editing PDFs is where most people run into issues

Editing requires a PDF editor software -most desktop editor apps are expensive to purchase but there are free online options. Try http:www.sejda.com, http:www.pdfescape.com, http:www.pdfpro.co, http:www.pdf2go.com and http:www.smallpdf.com

In case you just want to merge multiple PDF files, you can head to http:www.pdfmerge.com

If your requirement is just annotation and removing pages from a PDF document you can use Lumin PDF (http:www.luminpdf.com) -it works with Google Drive and you need to sign-up for a free account

Another way to edit PDF files is to open them in Microsoft Word -word will convert the document for editing but be advised that formattinglayout may not be preserved

In case you want to create a pdf file from scratch, you can make a MS word doc file and save it in PDF format. Alternatively, you can create one on https:online.sodapdf.com

source:-tech.economictime

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